LECTURES 



ON 



SUBJECTS CONNECTED WITH 



LITERATURE AND LITE. 



BY 



EDWIN P, WHIPPLE, 

AUTHOR OF "ESSAYS AND REVIEWS. 



SECOND EDITION. 






BOSTON: 
TICKNOR, REED, AND FIELDS. 

M DCCC L. 



?HSi 



I % so 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by 

E. P. Whipple, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts 



Stereotyped by 
HOBART & ROBBINS; 

NEW ENGLAND TYPE AND STEREOTYPE FOUNDBRY, 
B STON. 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. Page 

Authors in their Relations to Life, 7 

LECTURE II. 
Novels and Novelists. — Charles Dickens, ... 42 

LECTURE III. 
Wit and Humor, 84 

LECTURE IV. 
The Ludicrous Side of Life, 122 

LECTURE V. 
Genius, 156 

LECTURE VI. 
Intellectual Health and Disease, 186 



LECTURE I.* 



AUTHORS IN THEIR RELATIONS TO LIFE. 

There has existed in all ages a class of men, called at 
different periods by different names, but generally com- 
prehended under the name of authors. They hold the 
same relation to the mind of man that the agriculturist 
and manufacturer bear to his body ; and by virtue of 
their sway over the realms of thought and emotion, they 
have exercised a vast influence upon human affairs, 
which has too often been overlooked or denied by earth's 
industrial and political sovereigns. Operating as they 
do on unseen substances, and working silent and mys- 
terious changes in the inward man, without altering 
his external aspect, they have strangely puzzled the 
whole horde of bigots and tyrants, and have written their 
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin on the walls of earth's 
proudest palaces. On the occasion of a literary anni- 
versary like yours, I am aware of no more appropriate 

* Delivered before the Literary Societies of Brown University, 
Sept. 1, 1846. 



8 AUTHORS. 

subject, — none which is more likely to bear, remotely 
or immediately, on your own future pursuits and profes- 
sions, — than this of Authors ; and in tracing out some 
of their relations to life, I think I can inflict less tedious- 
ness upon you than if I had selected some topic with a 
more resounding name, and admitting of more ambitious 
disquisition. My object will be to set forth their moral 
and intellectual influence, the physical necessities which 
have modified the direction of their powers, and the dis- 
crepancies observable between their internal and external 
existence. This will involve a consideration of their 
relations to their age, to booksellers, and to domestic and 
social life. You must pardon the remediless superficial- 
ity of my view, as each division might well exhaust a 
volume. • 

And first, let us refer to the influence of authors, and 
the position they have occupied in the world. 

Without taking into view the lives and thoughts of 
authors, history becomes an enigma, or a many-volumed 
lie. We read of wars, crusades, persecutions, ameliora- 
tions, of mighty and convulsive changes in opinions and 
manners, without obtaining any clue to the real causes 
of events, any insight into the laws of God's providence. 
Without inweaving literary into civil history, we gain no 
knowledge of the annals of human nature. We have 
the body of history without the soul, — events without 



AUTHORS 9 

ideas, — effects without causes, — the very atheism of 
narrative. The abridgments we study at schools are 
commonly made up of incidents jumbled together like 
beads, and unconnected by any thread of reason and 
reality. It is hardly possible for a boy, studying these 
works, to grasp any other idea of man than the idea of 
a being with legs, arms, and appetites. 

Now it is a fact that Thought, true or false, bene- 
ficial or pernicious, has borne the sceptre of influence 
in this world's affairs. Impulse, whim and chance, have 
not been the blind guides of the generations of men. 
Above all the fret and tumult of active existence, above 
the decrees of earth's nominal sovereigns, above all the 
violence and evil which render what is called history so 
black a record of folly and crime — above all these, there 
have ever been certain luminous ideas, pillars of fire in 
the night of time, which have guided and guarded the 
great army of humanity, in its slow and hesitating, but 
still onward, progress in knowledge and freedom. It is 
not the ruler that makes the most noise in the world, that 
most shapes the world's fortunes. Ten rockets, sent vio- 
lently into the air, by their blaze and impotent fury, 
attract all eyes, and seem much finer and grander than 
the eternal stars ; but after their short and rushing life 
has burnt out, and they have noised themselves into 
nothingness, the stars still shine serenely on, and seem 



10 AUTHORS. 

almost to look down with contempt on the crowd who 
have been fooled into fear or admiration. Thus is it in 
history. The being to whose commands is given a brief 
omnipotence, — whose single word moves myriads of 
men, — on whom power and glory are lavished without 
measure, — is often but the mere instrument of some 
idea or principle, mightier than he ; and to find his mas- 
ter and king, we must travel back years, and perhaps 
ages, and seek him in the lonely cell of some poor and 
despised student, whose busy brain is shaping in silence 
those immaterial substances, destined to shake the world ; 
to fall like fire upon the hearts of men, and kindle in 
them new life and energy ; to overthrow and to rebuild 
thrones : to be the roots of new moral and intellectual 
dynasties ; and, keeping their way through generation 
after generation, to come out in the end gloriously or in- 
famously, according as they are founded in justice and 
truth, or falsehood and wrong. Thus the thinker ever 
precedes the actor. Thoughts ever have to battle them- 
selves into institutions. The passage of a paradox into 
a truism is attended with numberless commotions. With 
these commotions, rather than with the ideas and feel- 
ings whence they spring, history has chiefly chosen to 
deal ; and it rarely notices the ten thousand agencies 
operating on a nation's mind, until revolutions have 
passed from thoughts into facts, and made themselves 



AUTHORS. 11 

known on fields of stricken battle. Every great origin- 
ating mind produces in some way a change in society ; 
every great originating mind whose exercise is controlled 
by duty, effects a beneficial change. This effect may be 
immediate, may be remote. A nation may be in a tumult 
to-day, for a thought which the timid Erasmus placidly 
penned in his study more than two centuries ago. 
Thought may be first written in an unintelligible jargon, 
in Benthamese or Kantese, for instance ; but every Ben- 
tham finds his Dumont, and every Kant his Cousin. An 
author may affect his race through conductors. He may 
be mysterious ; others will translate him to the people. 
He may be a coward ; others will do the fighting. He 
may be a wretch, studious of infamy ; Humanity takes 
the thought, and spurns the man. Many poets who have 
led lives of luxury and effeminacy, and sat honored 
guests at the tables of tyrants, have still exalted our con- 
ceptions of intellectual excellence, refined our manners, 
extended the range of our sympathies. They have mod- 
ified the institutions of society by modifying the mental 
character of society, of which institutions are the out- 
ward expression. A change in thought or prejudice 
works out, in the end, a change in governments and 
laws. " Beware," says a brilliant essayist, " when the 
great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all 
things are at risk." 



12 AUTHORS. 

Authors are thus entitled to a prominent rank among 
the producing classes, and their lives deserve a more 
intelligent scrutiny from the practical men who stigma- 
tize them as dreamers. Their importance has rarely 
been correctly estimated, either in summing up a na- 
tion's wealth or a nation's dangers. Society has played 
with them its most capricious game of coquetry. The 
same generation which neglects or tortures a man of 
letters, will often supply a whole army of admiring com- 
mentators to distort his works. 

11 Ten ancient towns contend for Homer dead, 
Through which the living Homer begged his bread." 

No language can fitly express the meanness, the base- 
ness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated 
its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is 
worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by 
persecution. Milton, in his own day, was " Mr. Milton, 
the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's per- 
son ;" and soon after, " the mighty orb of song." These 
absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recogni- 
tion just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, 
sadden all intellectual history. Is it not strange that 
the biography of authors should be so steeped in misery, 
— that while exercising the most despotic dominion 
that man can wield over the fortunes of his race, 
their own lives should so often present a melancholy 



AUTHORS. 



13 



spectacle of unrest, unhappiness, frailty, beggary, and 
despair ? 

What has been the fate of those who have striven 
hard to bring the actual world nearer to ideal perfection ? 
Has not fidelity to ideas, the exercise of moral courage 
in the cause of truth, when it could not be pensioned 
into apostacy, been too often rewarded with persecution 
into heaven ? The cold, lifeless axiom, so inoffensively 
ineffective, and so securely announced from the dull soul 
of the pedant — how has it been, when it came hissing hot 
from the gushing heart of genius, tearing and ripping up 
the surface concealments of tolerated sins ? Wherever a 
great soul has raised the banner of revolt against accred- 
ited fraud or honored duncery, thither has flown Igno- 
rance with her bats and owls, thither has sped Power with 
his racks and gibbets. Do you wonder that so much of 
the world's intellect has been chained, like a galley- 
slave, to the world's corruptions, when you find its free 
and honest exercise so often thus rewarded with poverty 
or death ? 

Time, to be sure, that consecrates all things, conse- 
crates even the lives of authors. When the great man 
is laid in his grave, lies of malice are apt to give way to 
lies of adulation. Men feel his genius more, and his 
faults less. The cry then is, to bury the evil he has 
done with his bones, — to forbear dragging his frailties 



14 AUTHORS. 

from their dread abode. Then steps forth a debonair 
biographer, to varnish his errors or crimes, in order that 
he may appear respectably before that dear public whose 
stupidity or caprice may have urged him to their com- 
mission. It is well, after calumny has feasted and 
fattened on his name, that he should undergo the solemn 
foolery of a verbal beatitude ! Indeed, it seems strange, 
that the old maxim declaring no human being to have 
arrived at perfection on earth should still be heard from 
the pulpit, when even every newspaper obituary gives 
it the lie ! 

There is, indeed, a natural disposition with us to judge 
an author's personal character by the character of his 
works. We find it difficult to understand the common 
antithesis of a good writer and a bad man. We dislike 
to believe that any of those gifted beings who have been 
the choicest companions of our best and happiest hours, 
who have kindled or exalted our love of the beautiful and 
good, who have given us knowledge and power, and 
whose words rebuke us for our own moral as well as 
mental inferiority, should have ugly spots of meanness 
or baseness blotting their bright escutcheons. We in- 
stinctively lend a greedy ear to the weakest apologies 
offered in behalf of our favorites, and side with them 
against any who may have been their adversaries or 
victims. The greater the writer, the more pertinaciously 



AUTHORS. 15 

we sophisticate away the faults of the man. We side 
with Pope in his quarrel with Cibber, with Addison in 
his quarrel with Steele. We give little credence to the 
fact that Bacon took bribes, or that Byron took gin. No 
notoriety given to Campbell's vices can make us believe 
the creator of Gertrude, envious, malignant and sottish. 
Let mediocrity commit similar faults to those we pardon 
in genius, and we should hurl at it our loudest thunders 
of rebuke. Forgetting that writers are men, exposed to 
more than common trials and temptations, we fondly 
believe their external life always in harmony with their 
internal ideals. A little reflection teaches us that the 
truisms of thought are the paradoxes of action. If this 
be true, then the ideals of thought may be almost classed 
among the prodigies of conduct; and in literature we 
must often be indebted for priceless benefits to men 
personally unworthy of our esteem ; to have our cour- 
age kindled by the oratory of cowards ; our confidence 
in virtue strengthened by the poetry of debauchees ; and 
our loftiest sentiments of liberty and disinterestedness 
ennobled by imaginations shaped by the servile and the 
mean. 

To reconcile this monstrous anomaly with nature, we 
must recollect two things : first, that the possession of 
great energies of mind does not suppose the absence of 
bad passions ; and second, that authors are compelled, 



16 AUTHORS. 

like other men, to labor for a subsistence. In some cases, 
it is true, the man of genius is blasted from within ; his 
genius becoming the slave of unbitted passions and 
satanic pride. Thus Campbell compared the unwearied 
fire that burned in the breast of Byron to the " robe and 
golden crown which Medea, in Euripides, sends Glauce, 
the wife of Jason ; their beauty and magic loveliness did 
not prevent them from consuming to ashes the victim 
whom they so gorgeously adorned." In some cases, too, 
the lust of the intellect has been stronger than the lust 
of the flesh, and put iron wills into evil hearts, 

" Whose steep aim 
Was, Titan-like, on daring doubts to pile 
Thoughts which should draw down thunder, and the flame 
Of heaven." 

But poverty, perhaps, has been the most fertile source 
of literary crimes. Men of letters have ever displayed 
the same strange indisposition to starve common to other 
descendants of Adam. The law of supply and demand 
operates in literature as in trade. For instance, if a 
poor poet, rich only in the riches of thought, be placed in 
an age which demands intellectual monstrosities, he is 
tempted to pervert his powers to please the general taste. 
This he must do or die, and this he should rather die 
than do ; but still, if he hopes to live by his products, he 
must produce what people will buy, — and it is already 



AUTHORS. 



17 



supposed that nothing will be bought except what is 
brainless or debasing. The opposite of this is likewise 
true. If a man of mental power and moral weakness be 
placed in an age which demands purity in its literature, 
his writings may exhibit a seraphical aspect, while his 
life is stained with folly and wickedness. Thus it is 
that many writers who have lived decently good lives 
have written indecently bad works ; and many who have 
lived indecently bad lives have written decently good 
works ; and the solution of the mystery lies not in the 
brain, but in the physical necessities, of the man. Poets 
are by no means wingless angels, fed with ambrosia 
plucked from Olympus, or manna rained down from 
heaven. 

This brings us to one great division in every author's 
life, — his relation to the public. This can be best illus- 
trated by a pertinent example from a corrupt age. John 
Dryden had a clear perception of moral truth, and no 
natural desire to injure his species. He was an eminent 
professional author during the reign of Charles II. The 
time in which he lived was one of great depravity of taste, 
and greater depravity of manners. Authors seemed 
banded in an insane crusade to exalt blasphemy and 
profligacy to the vacant throne of piety and virtue. 
Books were valuable according to the wickedness blended 
with their talent. Mental power was lucrative only in 
2 



18 AUTHORS. 

its perversion. The public was ravenous for the witty 
iniquities of the brain ; and, to use the energetic invec- 
tive of South, laid hold of brilliant morsels of sin, with 
"fire and brimstone naming round them, and thus, as 
it were, digested death itself, and made a meal upon per- 
dition" Now, it is evident, in such a period as this, a 
needy author was compelled to choose between virtue 
attended by neglect, and vice lackeyed by popularity. 
One of Sir Charles Sedley's profligate comedies, one of 
Lord Rochester's ribald lampoons, possessed more mer- 
cantile value than the Paradise Lost. In such a period 
as this, the poet should have descended upon his time, 
like Schiller's ideal artist, "not to delight it with his pres- 
ence, but terrible, like the son of Agamemnon, to purify 
it." Dry den was placed in this age, and, for a long period 
of his life, was its pander and parasite. The author 
of Alexander's Feast condescended to write comedies 
whose ferocious licentiousness astounds and bewilders 
the modern reader. Yet, had he lived in the reign of 
George III., he would not have been more immoral than 
Churchill; had he lived in our day, his muse would 
have been as pure as that of Campbell. He could not, 
or would not, learn that it is better to starve on honesty 
than thrive on baseness. "It is hard," says an old 
English divine, " to maintain truth, but still harder to 
be maintained by it." 



AUTHORS. 19 

Now this mercantile or economical element, this dispo- 
sition to let out talent as a jaded hack in the service of 
Satan, when Satan pays the price, looks out upon us con- 
stantly from literary history. In this connection it would 
be unjust not to pay a passing tribute to that long-eared 
wisdom which obtains in our country, of starving authors 
down into despair in order that they may be lifted thence 
by sin — that sagacious philosophy which sees no danger 
in neglecting a poor novelist or poet, and then contrives 
to be astonished at the ability displayed in an atheistic 
pamphlet or an agrarian harangue. The merchant, who 
sneers at literary pursuits, shuts his purse when a new 
volume appears, and clamors for the protection of all 
manufactures but those of the mind, might, perhaps, 
if he were logically inclined, trace some connection be- 
tween his foolish illiberality and a financial storm which 
stripped him of half his fortune, or a quack medicine 
which poisoned his wife, or a bad book which ruined the 
morals of his son. It is this senseless and disgraceful 
contempt for the power of authors which causes much 
of the perversion of talent so common in our day. Let 
us suppose the case of a man who, led by some inscruta- 
ble inward impulse, adopts the profession of American 
authorship. Of course, this act would furnish indubi- 
table proof of insanity in any candid court of justice ; but 
waiving that consideration, let us hear the advice given 



20 AUTHORS. 

to him after his first book has gone the way of the trunk- 
maker's, after a sale of ten copies. He is told that he 
made a mistake in the selection of his subject; that 
the people want something in the " flash line." It is 
well for him if he can reconcile the flash line with the 
line of duty. However, he proceeds in his course, until 
all notion of the dignity of authorship vanishes from his 
mind. Literature, to him, is the manufacture of ephem- 
eral inanities and monstrous depravities, to serve as food 
for fools and vagabonds. He is ready to write on any 
subject which will afford him bread, — moral or immoral, 
religious or atheistic, solid or flash. He lets out his pen 
to the highest bidder, as Captain Dalgetty let out his 
sword. You may hire him to write transcendentalism ; 
you may hire him to write brain-sick stories for namby- 
pamby magazines; you may hire him to write quack 
advertisements. And this is a successor of John Milton, 
— as Pope Joan was a successor of Saint Peter ! But 
where lies the blame? The "respectable" portion of 
society aver that the blame lies in the author ; reason 
seems to assert that the blame lies in the " respectable " 
portion of society. 

Indeed, it seems impossible for men to realize the im- 
portance and influence of authors, as purifiers or poison- 
ers of the public taste and morals. For evil or good, 
they exercise a vast and momentous dominion. But 



AUTHORS. 21 

they are not generally men distinguished from other men 
by superior strength of principle. If neglected and 
despised, they teach the lesson, that if virtue and truth 
decline paying wages to talent, falsehood and profligacy 
are not so parsimonious. 

Burke, no superficial reader of men and books, says, 
in one of his immortal pamphlets, that " he can form a 
tolerably correct estimate of what is likely to happen in 
a character chiefly dependent for fame and fortune on 
knowledge and talent, both in its morbid and perverted 
state, and in that which is sound and natural. Natu- 
rally, such men are the first gifts of Providence to the 
world. But when they have once cast off the fear of 
God, which in all ages has been too often the case, and 
the fear of man, which is now the case ; and when, in 
that state, they come to understand one another, and to 
act in corps, a more fearful calamity cannot arise out of 
hell to scourge mankind." Now, whether American 
authors are to be scourges or blessings rests with 
those who are to be injured or benefited. But one 
thing is certain, that social order, good government, 
correct morals, cannot long be preserved after well- 
fed and well-principled mediocrity has divorced itself 
from ill-fed and loose-principled talent. And it is per- 
fectly right that it should be so. It is according to the 
heaven-ordained constitution of things. A nation which 



22 AUTHORS. 

places implicit reliance on steam-engines and mill-privi- 
leges will find that in all that affects the weal or woe of 
communities mind-power is greater than steam-power, 
— a truth which should be held up in the faces of our 
shrewd and prudent worldlings, till, like the poet's mirror 
of diamond, " it dazzle and pierce their misty eye-balls. " 
It is doubtless very pleasant, and very agreeable, to shoot 
out the tongue at the mere mention of a national litera- 
ture, to belittle and degrade the occupation of letters ; but 
let those complacent gentlemen who practise the jest look 
to it that the sparks they would trample under foot fly 
not up in their own faces. " Literature," said Mr. Pitt to 
Robert Southey, " will take care of itself." — " Yes," was 
the reply, " and take care of you too, if you do not see 
to it." 

But there is a class of authors different from those 
who cringe to prevalent tastes, and pander to degrading 
passions ; men whom neither power can intimidate, nor 
flattery deceive, nor wealth corrupt; the heroes of intel- 
lectual history, who combine the martyr's courage with 
the poet's genius, and who, in the strength of their fixed 
wills and free hearts, might have scoffed as divinely at 
the threats of earth-born power as the Virgin Martyr of 
Massinger at the torturers of Diocletian and Maximi- 
nus: — 



AUTHORS. 23 

" The visage of the hangman frights not me ! 
The sight of whips, racks, gibbets, axes, fires, 
Are scaffoldings on which my soul climbs up 
To an eternal habitation." 

This class, it must be confessed, is small. It does not 

include many men of unquestioned genius. It does not 

include many whose works will be read and loved forever. 

But such an one was Dante, to whose raised spirit, 

even in this life, the world had passed away. Such was 

Schiller, toiling for twenty years up the topless pinnacle 

of thought, unconcpiered by constant physical pain, his 

upward eye ever fixed on his receding ideal. Such was 

Shelley, who made his stricken life, with all its stern 

agonies and cruel disappointments, 

" A doom 
As glorious as a fiery martyrdom." 

Such was Wordsworth, unmoved by ridicule and neglect, 
calmly writing poems for another generation to read. 
And such, above all, was Milton. No eulogy, though 
carved in marble, can rightly celebrate his character and 
genius : — 

11 Nothing can cover his high fame, but Heaven ; 
No monument set off his memories, 
But the eternal substance of his greatness." 

The austere grandeur of his life may well excite the 
wonder of the traders, panders and parasites of literature. 
His patience and conscience were tried by all the calami- 



24 AUTHORS. 

ties which break down the spirits of common men, — by 
sickness, by blindness, by poverty, by the ingratitude of 
his children, by the hatred of the powerful, by the malice 
of the base. But the might of his moral nature overcame 
them all. No one can fitly reverence Milton who has not 
studied the character of the age of Charles II. , in which 
his later fortunes were cast. He was Dryden's contem- 
porary in time, but not his master or disciple in slavish- 
ness. He was under the anathema of power : a repub- 
lican, in days of abject servility ; a Christian, among men 
whom it would be charity to call infidels ; a man of pure 
life and high principle, among sensualists and rene- 
gades. On nothing external could he lean for support. 
In his own domain of imagination perhaps the greatest 
poet that ever lived, he was still doomed to see such 
pitiful and stupid poetasters as Shadwell and Settle 
bear away the shining rewards of letters. "Well might 
he declare that he had fallen on evil times ! He was 
among his opposites, — a despised and high-souled Puri- 
tan-poet, surrounded by a horde of desperate and disso- 
lute scribblers, who can be "compared, as an accomplished 
critic has eloquently said, "to nothing so fitly as the 
rabble in Comus, grotesque monsters, half bestial, 
half human, dropping with wine, bloated with glut- 
tony, reeling in obscene dances. Amidst these his 
muse was placed, like the chaste lady of the masque, 



AUTHORS. 25 

lofty, spotless and serene, — to be chattered at, and 
pointed at, and grinned at, by the whole rabble of satyrs 
and goblins." Yet, from among such base environ- 
ments, did Milton " soar in the high reason of his fan- 
cies, with his garland and singing robes about him;" 
and while suffering the bitterest penalties of honesty and 
genius, in that age of shallow wit and profound villany, 
his soul never ceased to glow with the grandeur of 
that earlier day, when he had stood forth foremost 
among the champions of truth, and like his own invinci- 
ble warrior, Zeal, " a spirit of the largest size and 
divinest mettle," had driven his fiery chariot over the 
heads of " scarlet prelates," " bruising their stiff necks 
under his flaming wheels." The genius of Milton is 
indeed worthy all the admiration we award marvellous 
intellectual endowment ; but how much more do we ven- 
erate the whole man, when we find it riveted to that high 
and hardy moral courage which makes his name thunder 
rebuke to all power that betrays freedom, to all genius 
that is false to virtue ! Dante, Schiller, Shelley, Milton, 
— poets, heroes, martyrs, — must the mournful truth be 
forced from our reluctant lips, — 

" Their mighty spirits 
Lie raked up with their ashes in their urns, 
And not a spark of their eternal fire 
Glows in a present bosom." 



26 AUTHORS. 

The relation of an author to his age is the most impor- 
tant of his life. We have seen what terrible temptations 
beset him in this relation, — how apt are his principles to 
break like bubbles into air, when tried by want and oblo- 
quy. But, perhaps, with him it is more properly a rela- 
tion to his publisher ; and certainly few chapters of liter- 
ary history are more curious than those relating to the 
connection of writers and booksellers. In this division 
of his life, the man of letters appears as a man of busi- 
ness. No two classes connected by ties of interest have 
hated each other more cordially than these ; and none 
have had more reason. It is difficult to say which has 
suffered most. The result of all inquiries may be 
summed up in this, — that booksellers have realized for- 
tunes out of works they purchased for a pittance, and 
that on a majority of published books there has been a 
loss. "Learning," pithily says old Dr. Fuller, "has 
made most by those books on which the printers have 
lost." On one side, we are told that booksellers are 
grasping and knavish; capitalists who loan money on 
mortgages of brain and conscience; bon-vivants, who 
drink their wine out of authors' skulls. That fine old 
poet, Michael Drayton, calls them " a base company of 
knaves, whom he scorns and kicks at." Epithets as 
contemptuous swarm in all printed books. Indeed, the 
author heretofore has shown little sagacity in his deal- 



AUTHORS. 27 

ings with "the trade." He has sold his commodities 
when spurred by pressing necessities ; and it is an uni- 
versal rule, that when the author wants money the pub- 
lisher never wants books. No writer who does not 
desire to end his life in beggary and despair, should 
ever treat with a bookseller when he is dunned by a 
washerwoman or dogged by a sheriff. In the present 
century, Scott, Byron, Moore, Mackintosh, and Dickens, 
have shown in this far more tact and shrewdness than 
their brethren of former times. Scott was nominally 
paid nearly a million of dollars for his works. Byron 
received ten dollars a line for the fourth canto of Childe 
Harold. Moore obtained two thousand pounds for his 
Life of Sheridan, three thousand pounds for Lalla Eookh, 
four thousand pounds for his Life of Byron. The list 
might be indefinitely extended. But, in fact, until the 
latter part of the last century, the science of book- 
making and book-publishing was imperfectly understood. 
The " reading public " is a creation of the last eighty 
years. Previously, writers depended for subsistence 
chiefly on the theatre, the patronage of the noble, the 
favor of sects and factions. The age of general intel- 
ligence, which makes the great body of the nation the 
dispensers of fame and fortune, had not commenced. 
The work best remunerated during the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries was Pope's translation of the Iliad, 



28 AUTHORS. 

for which he received about five thousand three hun- 
dred pounds. Most of Pope's contemporaries were but 
poorly paid for their literary tasks, and he himself re- 
ceived but fifteen pounds for the Essay on Criticism, and 
twenty-two pounds for the Eape of the Lock. Byron 
calls the hacks of an eminent bookseller of that period 
"Jacob Tonson's ragamuffins." Pope, in satirizing 
them, dwelt with malicious emphasis on their rags 
and their hunger. The age which succeeded that 
of Queen Anne was still worse. The patronage of 
nobles and politicians, which had been freely extended 
to the best poets of the preceding generation, was 
withdrawn. A large portion of the life of so eminent 
a man as Dr. Johnson was spent in a desperate and 
nearly fruitless attempt to keep up the connection be- 
tween his body and soul, constantly threatened by 
pressing want. The character of a considerable portion 
of professional authors was little higher than that of 
street beggars. Occasionally they would obtain a little 
money. Riot and gaming soon relieved them of it. 
With the proceeds of a successful pamphlet or servile 
dedication, to use the words of another, " they soon diced 
themselves into spunging-houses, or drank themselves 
into fevers." The art of dodging a bailiff and bilking a 
landlord was more important to the poet than the art 
of pointing an epigram or polishing a period. Some 



AUTHORS. 29 

of these men were fortunate enough to have residences 
in cellars or garrets ; but most of them, with the blue tent 
of the sky pitched above their heads, must have waited 
all night, with shivering frames, for the sweet influences 
fabled to fall from Orion and the Pleiades. The gulf 
that yawned between the mouth of a poet and the shop 
of a baker was almost as deep and wide as that which 
spread between Lazarus and Dives. Only by the fiercest 
exertion could the chasm be abridged, and a frail com- 
munication opened between the two. Of course, such 
persons, with five ravenous senses unsupplied, were ready 
to write anything which would afford them a few guineas. 
The booksellers, under whose " inquisitorious and tyran- 
nical duncery no free and splendid wit could flourish," 
keeping them accurately poised between want and utter 
starvation, employed them to celebrate any remarkable 
event, any piece of domestic scandal, any assault upon 
decorum and decency, which would be likely to sell. 
This era, the darkest and most dreary in English 
letters, presents the most melancholy satire on author- 
ship extant. There will you see the last infirmity and 
profanation of intellect, — sin shorn of its dazzling robes, 
and strutting no longer on its Satanic stilts, but creeping, 
shrivelled and shivering, to its slavish tasks, chained to 
the ever restless wheel of its objectless drudgery, to be 



30 



AUTHORS. 



tumbled down at last into the dust with poverty and 
shame. 

We now come to a delicate part of the subject, which 
every prudent man would wish to avoid, — the relation 
of authors to domestic life, their glory or shame as lovers 
and husbands. One great fact here stares us in the 
face, — that the majority of those men who, from Homer 
downwards, have done most to exalt woman into a 
divinity, have either been bachelors or unfortunate hus- 
bands. Prudence forbid that I should presume to give 
the philosophy of this singular, and, doubtless, accidental 
occurrence, or find any preestablished harmony be- 
tween heaven-scaling imaginations and vixenish wives. 
Still, it must be said, that not only with regard to poets, 
but authors generally, a great many have been unhap- 
pily married; and a great many more, perhaps you 
would say, unhappily unmarried. The best treatise on 
divorce was written by the laureate of Eve and the cre- 
ator of the lady in Comus. The biography of scholars and 
philosophers sometimes hints at voices neither soft nor 
low piercing the ears of men meditating on Greek roots, 
or framing theories of the moral sentiments. You al] 
know the aidful sympathy that Socrates received from 
Xantippe, in his great task of confuting the lying inge- 
nuities of the Greek sophists, and bringing down philos- 
ophy from heaven to earth. The face of one of Eng- 



AUTHORS, 31 

land's earliest and best linguists is reported to have often 
exhibited crimson marks, traced by no loving fingers; 
and Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and English, must often 
have met and run together in his brain, as it reeled 
beneath the confusing ring of a fair hand knocking at his 
ears. The helpmates of Whitelocke and Bishop Coop- 
er were tempestuous viragos, endowed with a genius 
for scolding, who burnt their husbands' manuscripts, 
and broke in upon their studies and meditations with 
reproaches and threats. Hooker, the saint and sage of 
English divinity, was married to an acute vixen, with a 
temper compounded of vinegar and saltpetre, and a 
tongue as explosive as gun-cotton. Addison espoused a 
countess ; and spent the rest of his life in taverns, clubs, 
and repentance. 

Some men of genius, Moliere and Eousseau, for ex- 
ample, have had unsympathizing wives. Sir Walter 
Scott, walking once with his wife in the fields, called 
her attention to some lambs, remarking that they were 
beautiful. " Yes," echoed she, " lambs are beautiful, — 
boiled ! " That incomparable essayist and chirping phi- 
losopher, Montaigne, married but once. When his good 
wife left him, he shed the tears usual on such occasions, 
and said he would not marry again, though it were to 
Wisdom herself. A young painter of great promise 
once told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he had taken a wife. 



32 AUTHORS. 

"Married!" ejaculated the horrified Sir Joshua; " then 
you are ruined as an artist." Michael Angelo, when 
asked why he never married, replied, — " I have espoused 
my art, and that occasions me sufficient domestic cares ; 
for my works shall be my children." The wives of 
Dante, Milton, Dry den, Addison, Steele, shed no glory- 
on the sex, and brought no peace to their firesides. The 
bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have 
come from poets. Love, indeed, has ever been the 
inspiration of poetry. From Theocritus all the way 
down to the young gentleman that drizzled in yesterday's 
newspaper, it has provoked millions on millions of good 
and bad verses, most of which have been kindly gathered 
by Oblivion under her dusky wing. Among these 
mountains of amatory poetry, there are doubtless some of 
the finest imaginations and truest and noblest sentiments 
ever breathed from the lips of genius ; but the greater 
portion only prove, that if love softens the heart, it does 
not always decline performing a similar service to the 
head. I know a very sensible man who preserves in an 
iron box some of these metrical indiscretions of his youth, 
in order, if he is ever accused of a capital crime, that he 
may produce them as furnishing indubitable proofs of 
insanity. The most notable instance of inconstancy 
related in the "loves of the poets" is that of Lucy 
Sacheverell, to whom Col. Lovelace, the Philip Sidney 



AUTHORS. 33 

of Charles I.'s court, was warmly attached. He cele- 
brated her accomplishments in some exquisite poetry ; 
but, on his being taken prisoner in one of the wars of the 
time, and reported to be dead, she hastily married 
another. He soon returned to his native land, impre- 
cated divers anathemas on the sex, and declined into a 
vagabond, — dying perhaps of a malady, common enough 
in dark ages, but now happily banished from genteel 
society, a broken heart. 

Perhaps the sweetest pictures in the poetry of human 
life are those which represent the domestic felicity 
of those authors who married happily. The wives 
of Wieland, Buffon, Gesner, Herder, Priestley, Words- 
worth, not to mention others, are especially honored 
among women. Who has not sometimes seen, in the 
wife of scholar or artist, that elusive and unutterable 
charm, which has made his heart echo the praise of 
Fletcher's ideal Panthea? — 

"She is not fair 
Nor beautiful ; these words express her not ; 
They say her looks have something excellent, 
That wants a name yet." 

Wordsworth, with that pensive spiritualism which char- 
acterizes all his poetry relating to the affections, has in 
three lines fitly immortalized his own noble wife, as 

3 



34 AUTHORS. 

11 She who dwells with me, whom I have loved 
With such communion, that no place on earth 
Can ever be a solitude to me." 

Wherever, in fact, a noble spirit has been fortunate in 
his domestic relations, he has left testimonials in his 
writings that those human affections, which are the 
monopoly of none, are more productive of solid happi- 
ness than wealth, or power, or fame ; than learning that 
comprehends all knowledge ; than understanding which 
sweeps over the whole domain of thought ; than imag- 
inations which rise and run over regions to which the 
" heaven of heavens is but a veil." 

Of the relations of authors to social life, of their habits, 
manners, dispositions in society, as contrasted with those 
displayed in their writings, a great deal that is interest- 
ing might be said. A man of letters is often a man 
with two natures,— one a book nature, the other a human 
nature. These often clash sadly. Seneca wrote in 
praise of poverty, on a table formed of solid gold, with 
two millions of pounds let out at usury. /Sterne was a 
very selfish man ; according to Warburton, an irreclaim- 
able rascal ; yet a writer unexcelled for pathos and char- 
ity. Sir Eichard Steele wrote excellently well on tem- 
perance, — when he was sober. Dr. Johnson's essays on 
politeness are admirable ; yet his " You lie, sir ! " and 
" You don't understand the question, sir ! " were too 

ft < <H 



AUTHORS. ISO 

common characteristics of his colloquies. He and Dr. 
Shebbeare were both pensioned at the same time. The 
report immediately flew, that the king had pensioned 
two bears, — a he-bear and a she-bear. Young, whose 
gloomy fancy cast such sombre tinges on life, was in 
society a brisk, lively man, continually pelting his 
hearers with puerile puns. Mrs. Carter, fresh from the 
stern, dark grandeur of the Night Thoughts, expressed 
her amazement at his flippancy. "Madam," said he, 
11 there is much difference between writing and talking." 
The same poet's favorite theme was the nothingness of 
worldly things ; his favorite pursuit was rank and riches. 
Had Mrs. Carter noticed this incongruity, he might have 
added, — "Madam, there is much difference between 
writing didactic poems and living didactic poems." 
Bacon, the most comprehensive and forward-looking of 
modern intellects, and in feeling one of the most benevo- 
lent, was meanly and wickedly ambitious of place. Of 
the antithesis between the thoughts of this great bene- 
factor of mankind and the actions of this inquisitor and 
supple politician, Macaulay remarks, in his short, sharp 
way, — " To be the leader of his race, in the career of 
improvement, was in his reach. All this, however, 
was of no avail while some quibbling special pleader 
was promoted before him to the bench; while some 
heavy country gentleman took precedence of him by 



36 AUTHORS. 

virtue of a purchased coronet; while some pander, 
happy in a fair wife, could obtain a more cordial salute 
from Buckingham; while some buffoon, versed in the 
latest scandal of the court, could draw a louder laugh 
from James." 

But enough for the external life of authors. Their 
inward life is what most concerns posterity, and consti- 
tutes their immortal existence. We might, for instance, 
speculate on the outward life of Shakspeare, and obtain 
tolerably clear notions of his acts and conversation as 
they appeared to his contemporaries ; but of those awful 
periods when the conceptions of Lear and Hamlet, of 
Macbeth and Timon, dawned upon his mind ; of those 
moments when his shaping and fusing imagination trav- 
ersed earth and heaven, "invisible but gazing;" of 
those hours of meditation when the whole chart of exist- 
ence lay before his inward eye, and he sounded all its 
depths and shallows ; — these we must seek in the im- 
mortal pages wherein they are chronicled. And here 
lies our indebtedness to authors, the undying benefactors 
of all ages. How shall we fitly estimate this vast inher- 
itance of the world's intellectual treasures, to which all 
are born heirs ? What words can declare the immeas- 
urable worth of books, — what rhetoric set forth the im- 
portance of that great invention which diffused them 
over the whole earth to glad its myriads of minds ? The 



AUTHORS. 37 

invention of printing added a new element of power to 
the race. From that hour, in a most especial sense, the 
brain and not the arm, the thinker and not the soldier, 
books and not kings, were to rule the world ; and weap- 
ons, forged in the mind, keen-edged and brighter than 
the sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and the battle- 
axe. The conflicts of the world were not to take place 
altogether on the tented field ; but Ideas, leaping from a 
world's awakened intellect, and burning all over with 
indestructible life, were to be marshalled against princi- 
palities and powers. The great and the good, whose 
influence before had been chiefly over individual minds, 
were now to be possessed of a magic, which, giving 
wings to their thoughts, would waft them, like so many 
carrier doves, on messages of hope and deliverance to 
the nations. Words, springing fresh and bright from 
the soul of a master-spirit, and dropping into congenial 
hearts like so many sparks of fire, were no longer to lose 
this being with the vibrations of the air they disturbed, 
or moulder with the papyrus on which they were writ- 
ten, but were to be graven in everlasting characters, 
and rouse, strengthen, and illumine the minds of all 
ages. There was to be a stern death-grapple between 
Might and Eight, — between the heavy arm and the 
ethereal thought, — between that which was and that 
which ought to be ; for there was a great spirit abroad in 



S3 AUTHORS. 

the world, whom dungeons could not confine, nor oceans 
check, nor persecutions subdue, — whose path lay through 
the great region of ideas, and whose dominion was over 
the mind. 

If such were the tendency of that great invention 
which leaped or bridged the barriers separating mind 
from mind and heart from heart, who shall calculate its 
effect in promoting private happiness ? Books, — light- 
houses erected in the great sea of time, — books, the 
precious depositories of the thoughts and creations of 
genius, — books, by whose sorcery times past become 
time present, and the whole pageantry of the world's 
history moves in solemn procession before our eyes ; — 
these were to visit the firesides of the humble, and lavish 
the treasures of the intellect upon the poor. Could we 
have Plato, and Shakspeare, and Milton, in our dwellings, 
in the full vigor of their imaginations, in the full freshness 
of their hearts, few scholars would be affluent enough to 
afford them physical support; but the living images of 
their minds are within the eyes of all. From their 
pages their mighty souls look out upon us in all their 
grandeur and beauty, undimmed by the faults and follies 
of earthly existence, consecrated by time. Precious and 
priceless are the blessings which books scatter around 
our daily paths. We walk, in imagination, with the 
noblest spirits, through the most sublime and enchanting 



AUTHORS. 39 

regions, — regions which, to all that is lovely in the 
forms and colors of earth, 

" Add the gleam, 
The light that never was on sea or land, 
The consecration and the poet's dream." 

A motion of the hand brings all Arcadia to sight. The 
war of Troy can, at our bidding, rage in the narrowest 
chamber. Without stirring from our firesides, we may 
roam to the most remote regions of the earth, or soar 
into realms where Spenser's shapes of unearthly beauty 
flock to meet us, where Milton's angels peal in our ears 
the choral hymns of Paradise. Science, art, literature, 
philosophy, — all that man has thought, all that man has 
done, — the experience that has been bought with the suf- 
ferings of a hundred generations, — all are garnered up 
for us in the world of books. There, among realities, in a 
" substantial world," we move with the crowned kings of 
thought. There our minds have a free range, our hearts 
a free utterance. Reason is confined within none of the 
partitions which trammel it in life. The hard granite of 
conventionalism melts away as a thin mist. We call 
things by their right names. Our lips give not the lie 
to our hearts. We bend the knee only to the great and 
good. We despise only the despicable ; we honor only 
the honorable. In that world, no divinity hedges a king, 



40 AUTHORS. 

no aecident of rank or fashion ennobles a dunce, or 
shields a knave. There, and almost only there, do our 
affections have free play. We can select our compan- 
ions from among the most richly gifted of the sons of 
God, and they are companions who will not desert us in 
poverty, or sickness, or disgrace. When everything 
else fails, — when fortune frowns, and friends cool, and 
health forsakes us, — when this great world of forms 
and shows appears a "two-edged lie, which seems but 
is not," — when all our earth-clinging hopes and ambi- 
tions melt away into nothingness, 

" Like snow-falls on a river. 
One moment white, then gone forever," — 

we are still not without friends to animate and console 
us, — friends, in whose immortal countenances, as they 
look out upon us from books, we can discern no change ; 
who will dignify low fortunes and humble life with 
their kingly presence; who will people solitude with 
shapes more glorious than ever glittered in palaces; 
who will consecrate sorrow and take the sting from 
care ; and who, in the long hours of despondency and 
weakness, will send healing to the sick heart, and 
energy to the wasted brain. Well might Milton exclaim, 
in that impassioned speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed 
Printing, where every word leaps with intellectual life, 
— " Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's 



■ 



AUTHORS. 41 

image ; but who destroys a good book kills reason itself, 
kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many 
a man lives a burden upon the earth; but a good 
book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, em- 
balmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond 
life!" 



LECTURE II.* 



NOVELS AND NOVELISTS. — CHARLES 
DICKENS. 

Much has been said and written on the uses and 
abuses of fiction. Novel-writing and novel-reading have 
commonly been held in low estimation by grave and 
sensible people, or rather by people whose gravity has 
been received as the appropriate garment of sense. 
Many are both amused, and ashamed of being amused, 
by this class of compositions ; and, accordingly, in the 
libraries of well-regulated families, untouched volumes 
of history and philosophy glitter on prominent book- 
shelves in all the magnificence of burnished bindings, 
while the poor, precious novel, dog's-eared and wasted 
as it may be by constant handling, is banished to some 
secret but accessible nook, in order that its modest 
merit may not evoke polite horror. It thus becomes 
a kind of humble companion, whose prattle is pleas- 

# Delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, 
December, 1844. 



NOVELS AND NOVELISTS. 43 

ant enough when alone, but who must be cut in 
genteel company. And thus, many a person whose 
heart is beating hard in admiration of Mr. Richard 
Turpin's ride to York, or whose imagination is filled 
with the image of Mr. James's solitary horseman slowly 
wending up the hill, still in public vehemently chatters 
on subjects with which he has no sympathy, and on 
books which he has never read. 

Against good novels, that is, against vivid representa- 
tions or idealizations of life, character, and manners, in 
this or in any past age, there would seem to be no valid 
objection ; but this department of literature has unfor- 
tunately been a domain in which the whole hosts of 
folly, stupidity, and immorality, have encamped. A 
good portion of the feeble things purporting to be novels 
are bad, and some of them execrably bad. Ink-wasters, 
who could write nothing else, whom nature never in- 
tended to write anything, have still considered them- 
selves abundantly qualified to write fiction; conse- 
quently, all the nonsense and fat-wittedness in poor 
perverted human nature have been fully represented in 
the congress of romance. Of all printed books that ever 
vexed the wise and charmed the foolish, a bad novel is 
probably that which best displays how far the mind can 
descend in the sliding scale of sense and nature. In the 
art of embodying imbecility of thought and pettiness of 



44 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

sentiment in a style correspondingly mean and gauzy, 
all other men and women have been fairly distanced by 
certain novelists, not altogether unblessed now with 
popularity and influence. 

This fact brings us to the distinctions existing between 
the widely different works classed under the common 
name of novels; namely, novels written by men of 
genius ; novels written by commonplace men ; and novels 
written by dunces. Commonplace and stupid novels, 
and commonplace and stupid admirers of them, every 
community can boast of possessing ; but prose fictions of 
the higher class are rare. When, however, a man of 
genius embodies his mind in this form, it is ridiculous to 
allow any prejudice against the name to prevent us from 
acquiring the knowledge and enjoying the delight he is 
able to convey. If he be a great novelist, we may be 
sure that he has succeeded in a department of letters 
requiring a richly-gifted mind and heart, and that his 
success entitles him to some of the proudest honors of 
the intellect. 

The novel, indeed, is one of the most effective, if not 
most perfect forms of composition, through which a com- 
prehensive mind can communicate itself to the world, 
exhibiting, as it may, through sentiment, incident, and 
character, a complete philosophy of life, and admitting a 
dramatic and narrative expression of the abstract princi- 



CHARLES DICKENS. 45 

pies of ethics, metaphysics, and theology. Its range is 
theoretically as wide and deep as man and nature. Life 
is its subject, life in all its changes and modifications, by 
climate, by national and local manners, by conventional 
usages, by individual peculiarities, by distance in time 
and space, by every influence, in short, operating on the 
complex nature of man. It is the most difficult of all 
medes-of composition", for, in its perfection, it requires a 
mind capable of perceiving and representing all varieties 
of life and character, of being tolerant to all, and of real- 
izing them to the eye and heart with vivid and vital 
truth. The great novelist should be a poet, philosopher, 
and man of the world, fused into one. Understanding 
man as well as men, the elements o f human nature as 
well as the laws of their combinations, he should possess 
the most extensive practical knowledge of society, the 
most universal sympathies with his kind, and a nature 
at once shrewd and impassioned, observant and creative, 
with large faculties harmoniously balanced. His enthusi- 
asm should never hurry him into bigotry of any kind, not 
even into bigoted hatred of bigotry ; for, never appearing 
personally in his work as the champion of any of his 
characters, representing all faithfully, and studious to 
give even Satan his due, he must simply exhibit things 
in their right relations, and trust that morality of effect 
will result from truth of representation. 



46 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

It is evident that this exacting ideal of a novelist has 
never been realized. In most of the novels written by- 
men of powerful talents, we have but eloquent expres- 
sions of one-sided views of life. In some, the author 
represents himself, ideals of himself, and negations of 
himself, instead of mankind. Others are rhetorical ad- 
dresses, in favor of vice or virtue, religion or irreligion, 
clumsily cast into a narrative and colloquial form, in 
which we have a view of the abstract feebly struggling 
after the concrete, but unable to achieve its laudable pur- 
pose. In some novels of a higher grade, we notice a 
predominance of the poetical, or philanthropic, or moral 
element, and though in these we may have pictures, the 
author constantly appears as showman. Perhaps Scott, 
of all novelists, approaches nearest to the ideal, as far as 
his perceptions in the material and spiritual world ex- 
tended. Whatever lay on the broad mirror of his imag- 
ination he fairly painted ; but there were many things 
which that mirror, glorious as it was, did not reflect. 
Fielding, within the range of his mind, approaches near 
absolute perfection ; and if he had possessed as keen a 
sense of the supernatural as the natural, he might have 
taken the highest rank among great constructive and 
creative minds; but he had no elevation of soul, and 
little power of depicting it in imagination. As it is, 
however, the life-like reality of the characters and scenes 



CHARLES DICKENS. 47 

he has painted, indicates that his genius was hounded 
by nothing but his sentiments. Perhaps the greatest 
single novel, judged by this standard of comprehensive- 
ness, is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. It was the rich 
result of ten years' labor; and there is hardly a faculty 
of the mind, a feeling of the heart, or an aspiration of 
the soul, which has not contributed something to its 
interest, its value, or its beauty. Imagination, fancy, 
passion, humor, sentiment, understanding, observation, 
— the shrewdest practical wisdom, the loftiest idealism, 
the acutest and most genial criticism on art and litera- 
ture, the keenest satire on social foibles, — all have their 
place within the limits of one novel, without producing 
confusion or discord; for they are all but ministers 
working the will of one self-conscious and far-darting in- 
telligence, that perceives with the clearest insight each 
shape and shade of many-colored life, without being 
swayed by any ; delineating everything, yet seemingly 
advocating nothing; and allowing virtue and vice, knowl- 
edge and ignorance, enthusiasm and mockery, to meet 
and jostle, with a provoking indifference, apparently, to 
the triumph of either. But perhaps the range of the 
characterization, including, as it does, so many varying 
types of humanity, from the vulgar sensualist to the 
mystic pietist, is more to be admired than the felicity 
with which each is individualized; and the English 



48 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS ! 

reader especially, while he cannot but wonder at the 
author's abundance of ideas, and be thrilled by the 
transcendent dramatic excellence displayed in the delin- 
eation of a few of the characters, will still miss that 
solid, substantial, indisputable personality he ever finds, 
not only in the creations of Shakspeare, but in those of 
Addison and Goldsmith, of Fielding and Scott. In 
Wilhelm Meister, we generally think more of the knowl- 
edge of man and nature we acquire through the charac- 
ters, than of the characters themselves, — a sign that 
the philosophic and the ideal have not been realized 
throughout with sufficient intensity to produce perfect 
forms of individual life. 

Although English literature is now, in respect to 
novels of character and manners, the richest in the 
world, we still find that the novel had not acquired 
much eminence as a department of imaginative litera- 
ture until about the middle of the last century. Prose 
fiction was generally abandoned to writers who lacked 
the ability to embody their folly or indecency in verse. 
Richardson was the first man of genius who put forth 
his whole strength in this department of composition, 
and Fielding began his admirable series of fictions rather 
with the design of ridiculing Richardson than of forming 
a new school of novelists. Smollett, without possessing 
Fielding's depth and geniality of nature, or Richardson's 



CHARLES DICKENS. 49 

intense sentiment and hold upon the passions, still ex- 
hibited so large a knowledge of the world, such immense 
fertility of invention, such skill in the delineation of 
humorists, and such power in awakening both laughter 
and terror, that his works, though vitiated by the caustic 
bitterness of his temper, and by a misanthropic vulgarity 
calculated to inspire disgust rather than pleasure, have 
won for him a position side by side with Richardson and 
Fielding, as the founder of an influential school of nov- 
elists. Following these great men in rapid succession, 
came Sterne, Goldsmith, Charles Johnstone, Fanny 
Burney, Walpole, Clara Reeve, Robert Bage, Macken- 
zie, and Mrs. Radcliffe, each of them possessing a vein 
of originality, and occupying some new department of 
fiction ; and two of them, Sterne and Goldsmith, estab- 
lishing a renown which promises to survive all mutations 
of taste. As the tone of morality and delicacy in works 
of fiction varies with the moral variations of society, and 
as the Anglo-Saxon mind seems penetrated by an ine- 
radicable love of coarseness, the writings of many men- 
tioned on our list are not particularly characterized by 
decorum. Indeed, until Miss Burney began to write, in 
1778, decency was not considered a necessary ingredient 
of romance. Richardson has a minute and ludicrously 
formal method of dwelling upon licentious situations, and 

Fielding and Smollett include a considerable amount of 
4 



50 



NOVELS AND NOVELISTS I 



profanity and ribaldry, which the least prudish reader 
must pronounce superfluous. The dunces, as a matter 
of course, adopted, with some additions, the vulgarity of 
their betters, and superadded large quantities of stupidity 
from their own minds. Novels, therefore, soon came 
under the ban of the religious and prudent ; anathemas 
were freely launched at them from the fireside and the 
pulpit; and parents might be excused for some bitter- 
ness of invective transcending the cool judgments of 
criticism, especially if a son was engaged in running the 
career of Peregrine Pickle, or a daughter was emulating 
the little eccentricities of Lady Betty Careless. 

But about the beginning of the present century, a new 
order of fictions came into fashion. As novelties com- 
monly succeed with the public, some enterprising authors 
tried the speculation of discarding indecency. Senti- 
mentality, the opposite evil, was substituted, and the 
dynasty of rakes was succeeded by the dynasty of flats. 
Lady Jane Brazenface, the former heroine, abdicated in 
favor of Lady Arabella Dieaway. The bold, free, reck- 
less libertine of the previous romances, now gave way to 
a lavendered young gentleman, the very pink and 
essence of propriety, faultless in features and in morals, 
and the undisputed proprietor of crushed affections and 
two thousand sterling a year. The inspiration of this 
tribe of novelists was love and weak tea ; the soul-shat- 



CHARLES DICKENS. 51 

tering period of courtship was their field of action. Con- 
sidered as a mirror of actual life, this school was inferior 
to the worst specimens of that which it supplanted ; for 
the human race deserves this equivocal compliment to its 
intelligence, that it has more rogues than sentimentalists. 
However, the thing, bad as it was, had its day. Santo 
Sebastiano, Thaddeus of Warsaw, The Children of the 
Abbey, and other dispensations of a similar kind, exer- 
cised the despotism of sentimental cant over the circu- 
lating libraries, and their painfully perfect Matildas, 
Annas, Theresas, and Lauras, became the ideal of the 
sex. It is evident that these novels, as we see them now 
enveloped in their moist atmosphere of sickly sensibility, 
required the smallest capital of intelligence that ever suf- 
ficed for the business of literature. A hero, whose duty 
it is to suffer impossible things and say foolish ones; 
a heroine, oscillating between elegant miseries and gen- 
teel ecstacies ; a testy old father, from whom the gout 
occasionally forces a scrap of reason ; a talkative maiden 
aunt, who imagines the hero to be in love with herself; 
a pert chambermaid, who fibs and cheats for her mis- 
tress, and, at the same time, looks after some John or 
Peter on whom her own undying affections have settled ; 
and a deep villain, who is the only sensible person in 
the book; — these shadows of character, — which the 
author has the impertinence to call men and women, — 



52 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

joined to an unlimited power to create and demolish for- 
tunes, constitute about all the matter we have been able 
to find in some scores of these novels. The style is 
bountifully sprinkled with a kind of interjectional pathos, 
consisting mainly of a frequent repetition of ah I and oh ! 
The whole wretched mixture, despicable in every re- 
spect, still passed for many years, with far the largest 
portion of the reading public, for the genuine expression 
of the human heart and imagination. 

It is principally from this vapid class of novels that 
the contemporary parental objection to works of fiction 
has arisen. Even at the period of their popularity, they 
were mostly esteemed by persons at a certain age of life 
and a certain stage of intellectual development ; and 
there are doubtless many still living who can recollect 
the peevish disdain with which the master, and the vol- 
uble indignation with which the mistress, of a family, 
beheld their entrance into the house. 

But these fictions all fled, like mists before the sun, 
when Scott appeared with Waverley. Since then, the 
novel has risen to a new importance in literature, and 
exerted a great influence upon departments of intellect- 
ual labor with which it seems to have little in common. 
Thierry, one of the greatest of modern historians, con- 
fesses that the reading of Ivanhoe revealed to him the 
proper method of historical composition. From being 



CHARLES DICKENS. 53 

the weak companion of the laziest hours of the laziest 
people, the novel, under the impulse it received from 
Scott, became the illustrator of history, the mirror and 
satirist of manners, the vehicle of controverted opinions 
in philosophy, politics, and religion. In its delineations 
of character and its romantic and heroical incidents, it 
took the place of the drama and the epic. But in becom- 
ing the most popular mode of communication with the 
public, it induced an indiscriminate rush of mediocrity 
and charlatanism into romance, so great as almost to 
overwhelm the talent and genius travelling in the same 
path. In addition to this multitude of rogues and dunces, 
there was another multitude of preachers and controver- 
sialists, eager to inculcate some system, good or bad, re- 
lating to other departments of literature, and who should 
have written treatises and sermons instead of novels. Mr. 
Plumer Ward desires to answer some arguments against 
Christianity, and forthwith publishes a novel. Professor 
Sewall has a dislike to the law of supply and demand, 
hates Lord John Russell and Sir Robert Peel, and con- 
siders Romanists and Dissenters as criminals ; and the 
result of these opinions and antipathies is a novel. Dr. 
Croly desires to give a narrative of some political and 
military events, and to analyze the characters of some 
prominent statesmen, during the present century ; and 
accordingly declaims, rhapsodizes, and pastes the purple 



54 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

patches of his rhetoric on a long colloquial dissertation, 
and calls the agglomeration a novel. There is, of 
course, no objection to the matter of their works, pro^ 
vided it were treated dramatically ; but this substitution 
of opinions for characters and incidents, is altogether 
from the purpose of novel-writing. 

Of these various classes of fiction, that which, next to 
Scott's, attained for a few years the most popularity and 
influence, was the school of Bulwer, or the novel of fash- 
ionable life. The publication of Pelham heralded a new 
intellectual dynasty of fops and puppies. Bulwer's orig- 
inal idea of a hero was the greatest satire ever written 
by a man of talent on his own lack of mental elevation. 
He attempted to realize in a fictitious character his no- 
tion of what a man should be, and accordingly produced 
an agglomeration of qualities, called Pelham, in which 
the dandy, the scholar, the sentimentalist, the statesman, 
the roiiiy and the blackguard, were all to be included in 
one "many-sided" man, whose merits would win equal 
applause from the hearty and the heartless, the lover and 
the libertine. Among these, however, the dandy stood 
preeminent ; and scholarship, sentiment, politics, licen- 
tiousness, and ruffianism, were all bedizened in the frip- 
pery of Almacks. To this character Bulwer added 
another, who may be described in general terms as a 
man burning with hatred and revenge, misanthropical 









CHARLES DICKENS. 55 

and moody, whose life had been blasted by some terrible 
wrong, and whose miserable hours were devoted to plots, 
curses, lamentations, and " convulsing " his face. These 
two types of character, the one unskilfully copied from 
Don Juan, the other from Lara, both of them Byronic as 
far as Bulwer could understand Byron, reappeared, like 
ghosts of ghosts, in most of his succeeding novels. How- 
ever much his mind may have grown, and his experi- 
ence of life increased, since his first plunge into romance, 
he has never yet fully emancipated himself from these 
original shackles. Indeed, Bulwer is rather an eloquent 
and accomplished rhetorician than a delineator of life 
and character. His intellect and feelings are both nar- 
rowed by his personal character, and things which clash 
with his individual tastes he criticizes rather than delin- 
eates. Everything that he touches is Bulwerized. A 
man of large acquirements, and ever ready to copy or 
pilfer from other authors, he discolors all that he borrows. 
The two sisters in Eugene Aram are copied directly from 
Scott's Minna and Brenda Troil, and their relative posi- 
tion is preserved ; but throughout there is manifested an 
inability to preserve the features of the originals in their 
purity, and accordingly their natural bloom soon changes 
to fashionable rouge. That a man thus without humor 
and dramatic imagination should be able to attain a 
wide reputation as a novelist, is a triumph of pretension 



56 



NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 



which must give delight to all engaged in experimenting 
on the discrimination of the public. If we compare 
him with any novelist possessing a vivid perception of 
the real, in actual or imaginary life, we see instantly the 
gulf which separates his splendid narrative essays from 
true novels ; and his unreal mockeries of men and wo- 
men, quickly passing from individualities into generaliz- 
ations, stand out as embodied opinions on life and char- 
acter, not representations of life and character. 

In regard to the question which has been raised as to 
the morality of Bulwer's fictions, it is hardly possible for 
any person who, in reading a book, is accustomed to 
observe the biases of the author's mind, to come but to 
one conclusion. Their general tendency is not only 
immoral, but it is evident that the writer plumes himself 
on being superior to that vulgar code of practical ethics 
which keeps society from falling to pieces ; and, in its 
place, favors us with a far more elegant system, of which 
the prominent principle is a morbid voluptuousness, com- 
pounded of sensuality and noble sentiments, and admit- 
ting many resounding epithets of virtue and religion, 
when they will serve either to dignify a meanness or 
point a period. To those who have no objection to 
devils provided they are painted, this peculiar form of 
morality may have its attractions. Considered in rela- 
tion to Bulwer's mind, it is one illustration of his defects 



CHARLES DICKENS. 57 

as a novelist, especially as indicating his lack of intel- 
lectual conscientiousness, of that fine sagacity which 
detects the false through all disguises, and seizes on the 
true and real with the felicity and speed of instinct. 
Without this genius for the truth, no novelist can suc- 
ceed in a consistent exhibition of character ; and its 
absence in Bulwer is the cause of the unnatural mixture 
of vices and virtues in the personages of his novels. In 
the present day, at least, when immorality is not of itself 
a passport to popularity, moral obliquity ever indicates 
an intellectual defect. 

The success of Bulwer stirred the emulation of a 
crowd of imitators, and for a considerable period the 
domain of fiction was deluged by a flood of fashionable 
novels. Bulwer possessed shining talents, if not a kind 
of morbid genius ; but most of those who followed in his 
wake produced a class of vapid fictions, full of puppyism 
and conceit, illumined by hardly a ray of common sense 
or moral sense, and as unparalleled in their dulness as 
in their debility. How such dreary trash contrived to 
find readers, is one of those unexplained mental phenom- 
ena not solvable by any received theory of the mind. 
Fashionable life is, at the best, but a perversion of life, 
and represents human nature in one of its most unnat- 
ural attitudes; but still it is life, and affords a fair 
though limited fielcj. for light satire and sketchy charac- 



58 



NOVELS AND NOVELISTS '. 



terization. The authorlings who essayed to delineate it, 
from their parlors or their garrets, brought to the task a 
large stock of impudence and French phrases, perfect 
freedom from moral obligations, a weakness of feeling 
which it would be a compliment to call feminine, and an 
extensive acquaintance with the modes and mysteries of 
wearing apparel. The drawing-room and the boudoir, 
the coxcomb's drawl and the fine lady's simper, white 
waistcoats and top-boots, — these were their inspiring 
themes. The leading merit of these authors consisted 
in their complete knowledge of clothes; their leading 
defect, in forgetting to put men and women into them. 
Lady Montague, in reference to a titled family of her 
day named Hervey, said that God had created men, 
women, and Hervey s. The fashionable novelists delin- 
eated the Herveys. 

About the time that this way of writing nonsense had 
lost its attractiveness, and every respectable critic wel- 
comed each new specimen of it with an ominous excla- 
mation of disgust, Charles Dickens appeared with the 
Pickwick Papers. The immediate and almost unprec- 
edented popularity he attained was owing not more to 
his own genius than to the general contempt for the 
school he supplanted. After ten years of conventional 
frippery and foppery, it was a relief to have once more a 
view of the earth and firmament, -^- to feel once more 



CHARLES DICKENS. 59 

one of those touches of nature " which make the whole 
world kin." Here was a man, at last, with none of the 
daintiness of genteel society in his manner, belonging to 
no clique or sect, with sympathies embracing widely 
varying conditions of humanity, and whose warm heart 
and observant eye had been collecting from boyhood 
those impressions of man and nature which afterwards 
gushed out in exquisite descriptions of natural scenery, 
or took shape in his Pickwicks, Wellers, Vardens, Peck- 
sniffs, and their innumerable brotherhood. 

Dickens, as a novelist and prose poet, is to be classed 
in the front rank of the noble company to which he be- 
longs. He has revived the novel of genuine practical 
life, as it existed in the works of Fielding, Smollett, and 
Goldsmith, but at the same time has given to his mate- 
rials an individual coloring and expression peculiarly his 
own. His characters, like those of his great exemplars, 
constitute a world of their own, whose truth to nature 
every reader instinctively recognizes in connection with 
their truth to Dickens. Fielding delineates with more 
exquisite art, standing more as the spectator of his per- 
sonages, and commenting on their actions with an ironi- 
cal humor, and a seeming innocence of insight, which 
pierces not only into but through their very nature, lay- 
ing bare their inmost unconscious springs of action, and 
in every instance indicating that he understands them 



60 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

better than they understand themselves. It is this per- 
fection of knowledge and insight which gives to his 
novels their naturalness, their freedom of movement, and 
their value as lessons in human nature as well as con- 
summate representations of actual life. Dickens's eye 
for the forms of things is as accurate as Fielding's, and 
his range of vision more extended ; but he does not 
probe so profoundly into the heart of what he sees, and 
he is more led away from the simplicity of truth by a 
tricksy spirit of fantastic exaggeration. Mentally he is 
indisputably below Fielding; but in tenderness, in pathos, 
in sweetness and purity of feeling, in that comprehen- 
siveness of sympathy which springs from a sense of 
brotherhood with mankind, he is as indisputably above 
him. 

The tendency of Dickens's genius, both in delineating 
the actual and the imaginary, is to personify, to individu- 
alize. This makes his page all alive with character. Not 
only does he never treat of man in the abstract, but he 
gives personality to the rudest shows of nature, every- 
thing he touches becoming symbolic of human sympa- 
thies or antipathies. There is no writer more deficient in 
generalization. His comprehensiveness is altogether of 
the heart, but that heart, like the intelligence of Bacon's 
cosmopolite, is not " an island cut off from other men's 
lands, but a continent which joins to them." His obser- 



CHARLES DICKENS. 61 

/ation of life thus beginning and ending with individuals, 
it seems strange that those highly sensitive and patriotic 
Americans who paid him the compliment of flying into 
a passion with his peevish remarks on our institutions, 
should have overlooked the fact that his mind was alto- 
gether destitute of the generalizing qualities of a states- 
man, and that an angry humorist might have made 
equally ludicrous pictures of any existing society. When 
his work on America was quoted in the French Chamber 
of Deputies, M. de Tocqueville ridiculed the notion that 
any opinions of Mr. Dickens should be referred to in that 
place as authoritative. There is a great difference be- 
tween the criticism of a statesman and the laughter of a 
tourist, especially when the tourist laughs not from his 
heart, but his bile. The statesman passes over individ- 
ual peculiarities to seize on general principles, while the 
whole force of the other lies in the description of individ- 
ual peculiarities. Dickens, detecting with the nicest tact 
the foibles of men, and capable of setting forth our Be- 
vans, Colonel Tompkinses, and Jefferson Bricks, in all 
the comic splendor of humorous exaggeration, is still 
unqualified to abstract a general idea of national charac- 
ter from his observation of persons. A man immeasur- 
ably inferior to him in creative genius might easily 
excel him in that operation of the mind. Indeed, were 
Dickens's understanding as comprehensive as his heart, 



62 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

and as vigorous as his fancy, he would come near realiz- 
ing the ideal of a novelist ; but, as it is, it is as ridicu- 
lous to be angry with any generalizations of his on 
American institutions and politics, as it would be to 
inveigh against him for any heresies he might blunder 
into about innate ideas, the freedom of the will, or origi- 
nal sin. Besides, as Americans, we have a decided 
advantage over our transatlantic friends, even in the 
matter of being caricatured by the novelist whom both 
are rivals in admiring; for certainly, if there be any 
character in which Dickens has seized on a national 
trait, that character is Pecksniff, and that national trait 
is English. 

The whole originality and power of Dickens lies in 
this instinctive insight into individual character, to which 
we have already referred. He has gleaned all his facts 
from observation and sympathy, in a diligent scrutiny 
of actual life, and no contemporary author is less in- 
debted to books. His style is all his own, its quaint 
texture of fancy and humor being spun altogether from 
his own mind, with hardly a verbal felicity which bears 
the mark of being stolen. In painting character he is 
troubled by no uneasy sense of himself. When he is 
busy with Sam Weller or Mrs. Nickleby, he forgets 
Charles Dickens. Not taking his own character as the 
test of character, but entering with genial warmth into 



CHARLES DICKENS. 



63 



the peculiarities of others, and making their joys and 
sorrows his own, his perceptions are not bounded by his 
personality, but continually apprehend and interpret new 
forms of individual being; and thus his mind, by the 
readiness with which it genially assimilates other minds, 
and the constancy with which it is fixed on objects exter- 
nal to itself, grows with every exercise of its powers. 
By this felicity of nature, the man who began his lit- 
erary life with a condemned farce, a mediocre opera, and 
some slight sketches of character, written in a style 
which but feebly indicated the germs of genius, produced 
before the expiration of eight years, The Pickwick Pa- 
pers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curi- 
osity Shop, and Martin Chuzzlewit, in a continually 
ascending scale of intellectual excellence, and achieved a 
fame not only gladly recognized wherever the English 
tongue was spoken, but which extended into France, 
Germany, Italy, and Holland, and caused the translation 
of his works into languages of which he hardly under- 
stood a word. Had he been an egotist, devoured by a 
ravenous vanity for personal display, and eager to print 
the image of himself on the popular imagination, his 
talents would hardly have made him known beyond 
the street in which he lived, and his mind by self-admi- 
ration would soon have been self-consumed. His fellow- 
feeling with his race is his genius. 



64 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS. 

The humanity, the wide-ranging and healthy sympa- 
thies, and, especially, the recognition of the virtues 
which obtain among the poor and humble, so observable 
in the works of Dickens, are in a great degree charac- 
teristic of the age, and without them popularity can 
hardly be won in imaginative literature. The sentiment 
of humanity, indeed, or a hypocritical affectation of it, 
has become infused into almost all literature and speech, 
from the sermons of Dr. Channing to the feuilletons of 
Eugene Sue. It is exceedingly difficult for a man to be 
as narrow as he could have been had he lived a century 
ago. No matter how bigoted may be the tendencies of 
his nature, no matter how strong may be his desire to 
dwell in a sulky isolation from his race, he cannot 
breathe the atmosphere of his time without feeling occa- 
sionally a generous sentiment springing to his lips, with- 
out perceiving occasionally a liberal opinion stealing into 
his understanding. He cannot creep into any nook or 
corner of seclusion, but that some grand sentiment or 
noble thought will hunt him out, and surprise his soul 
with a disinterested emotion. In view of this fact, a 
bigot, who desires to be a man of the tenth century, who 
strives conscientiously to narrow his intellect and shut 
his heart, who mumbles the exploded nonsense of past 
tyranny and exclusjveness, but who is still forced into 
some accommodation to the spirit of the age in which he 



CHARLES DICKENS. 65 

lives, is worthy rather of the tender commiseration than 
the shrewish invective of the philanthropists whom he 
hates but imitates. 

Now Dickens has an open sense for all the liberal 
influences of his time, and commonly surveys human 
nature from the position of charity and love. For the 
foibles of character he has a sort of laughing toleration ; 
and goodness of heart, no matter how overlaid with ludi- 
crous weaknesses, has received from him its strongest 
and subtlest manifestations. He not only makes us love 
our kind in its exhibitions of moral beauty, but also 
when frailties mingle with its excellence. Distinguish- 
ing, with the instinctive tact of genius, the moral differ- 
ences of persons and actions, and having a nicely ad- 
justed scale of the degrees of folly and wickedness, not 
one of his characters is just as wise or as foolish, as 
good or as bad, as another ; and he also contrives to effect 
that reconciliation of charity and morality, by which our 
sympathies with weakness and toleration of error never 
run into a morbid sentimentality. He deals in no soph- 
istries to make evil appear good, and the worse the bet- 
ter reason. He does not, as Bulwer is apt to do, dress 
up a crowd of sharpers and adulterers in the purple and 
fine linen of rhetoric, and then demand us to wish them 
well in their business, — an example of abstinence from 
a common peccadillo of romancers worthy of especial 
5 



66 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS I 

praise in an age which appreciates George Sand aiii 
Dumas. If he refrains from thus superadding noble sen- 
timents to animal appetites, he evolves, with a sagacity 
in which he is only excelled by Wordsworth, beautiful 
and heroic qualities from humble souls, disguised though 
they may be in unsightly forms, and surrounded by gro- 
tesque accompaniments. He makes the fact that happi- 
ness and virtue are not confined to any one class a real- 
ity to the mind ; and, by shedding over his pictures the 
consecrations of a heart full of the kindliest sympathies, 

11 Rustic life and poverty 
Grow beautiful beneath his touch." 

Kit Nubbles, in the Old Curiosity Shop, is a pertinent 
example, among numerous others, of this searching hu- 
manity of Dickens. Here is a boy, rough, uneducated, 
ill-favored, the son of a washer-woman, the very opposite 
of a common novelist's idea of the interesting, with a 
name which at once suggests the ludicrous ; yet, as 
enveloped in the loving humor of Dickens, he becomes 
a person of more engrossing interest and affection than a 
thousand of the stereotyped heroes of fiction. We not 
only like him, but the whole family, Mrs. Nubbles, Jacob, 
the baby and all ; and yet nothing is overcharged in the 
description, and every circumstance calculated to make 
Kit an object for laughter is freely used. The materials 



CHARLES DICKENS. 67 

I 

for numberless characters equally as interesting are 
within the reach of all novelists ; but most of them are 
ridden by some nightmare of dignity or gentility, which 
compels them to pass by the hero in the alley for some 
piece of etiquette and broadcloth in the drawing-room. 
It is not the least of Dickens's merits that he excelled all 
his contemporaries, not by attempting to rival them on 
their own selected vantage-ground, but by availing him- 
self of matter which they deemed only worthy of pitying 
contempt. He introduced the people of England to its 
aristocracy ; and though there were not wanting dainty 
and vulgar spirits to call his novels " low," he soon not 
only gained the popular voice, but he overthrew the 
fashionable novelists in their own circles, and his Wel- 
lers and Swivellers, edging their way into boudoirs and 
parlors, supplanted Pelhams and Cecils in the estimation 
of countesses. 

In thus representing life and character, there are two 
characteristics of his genius which startle every reader 
by their obviousness and power, — humor and pathos ; 
but, in respect to the operation of these qualities in his 
delineations, critics have sometimes objected that his 
humor is apt to run into fantastic exaggeration, and his 
pathos into sentimental excess. Indeed, in regard to his 
humorous characters, it may be said that the vivid inten- 
sity with which he conceives them, and the overflowing 



DO NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

I 

abundance of joy and merriment which springs instinct- 
ively up from the very fountains of his being at the 
slightest hint of the ludicrous, sometimes lead him to the 
very verge of caricature. He seems himself to be taken 
by surprise, as his glad and genial fancies throng into 
his brain, and to laugh and exult with the beings he has 
called into existence, in the spirit of a man observing, 
not creating. Squeers and Pecksniff, Sim Tappertit 
and Mark Tapley, Tony Weller and old John Willett, 
although painted with such distinctness that we seem to 
see them with the bodily eye, we still feel to be some- 
what overcharged in the description. They are carica- 
tured more in appearance than reality, and if grotesque 
in form, are true and natural at heart. Such caricature 
as this is to character what epigram is to fact, — a mode 
of conveying truth more distinctly by suggesting it 
through a brilliant exaggeration. When we say of a 
man, that he goes for the greatest good of the greatest 
number, but that the greatest number to him is number 
one, we express the fact of his selfishness as much as 
though we said it in a literal way. The mind of the 
reader unconsciously limits the extravagance into which 
Dickens sometimes runs, and, indeed, discerns the actual 
features and lineaments of the character shining the 
more clearly through it. Such extravagance is com- 
monly a powerful stimulant to accurate perception, espec- 



CHARLES DICKENS. 69 

ially to readers who lack fineness and readiness of intel- 
lect. It is not that caricature which has no foundation 
but in 

° The extravagancy 
And crazy ribaldry of fancy ;" 

but caricature based on the most piercing insight into 
actual life ; so keen, indeed, that the mind finds relief or 
pleasure in playing with its own conceptions. Shak- 
speare often condescends to caricature in this way, and 
so do Cervantes, Hogarth, Smollett, and Scott. Though 
it hardly approaches our ideal of fine characterization, it 
has its justification in the almost universal practice of 
men whose genius for humorous delineation cannot be 
questioned. 

That Dickens is not led into this vein of exaggeration 
by those qualities of wit and fancy which make the cari- 
caturist, is proved by the solidity with which his works 
rest on the deeper powers of imagination and humor. A 
caricaturist rarely presents anything but a man's peculi- 
arity, but Dickens ever presents the man. He so pre- 
serves the keeping of character that everything said or 
done by his personages is either on a level with the 
original conception or develops it. They never go be- 
yond the pitch of thought or feeling by which their per- 
sonality is limited. Thus, Tony Weller, whose round 
fat body seems to roll about in a sea of humor, makes us 



70 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS I 

laugh at his sayings as much because he says them as 
for any merriment they contain in themselves. His 
oddities of remark are sufficiently queer to excite laugh- 
ter, but they receive their peculiar unction from his con- 
ception of his own importance and his belief in the 
unreachable depths of his own wisdom. Mr. Pickwick 
compliments the intelligence of his son Sam. " Werry 
glad to hear of it, sir," he replies ; " I took a great deal 
o' pains in his eddication, sir; let him run the streets 
when he wos very young, and shift for hisself. It 's the 
only way to make a boy sharp, sir." His infallibility in 
matters relating to matrimony and widows is a good 
instance of the method in which a novelist may produce 
ludicrous effect by emphasizing an oddity of opinion, and 
at the same time connect it with the substance of char- 
acter. When Sam sends the Valentine to Mary, the 
old man's forecasting mind sees the consequences, and 
he bursts out in that affecting rebuke, — "To see you 
married, Sammy, to see you a deluded wictim, and 
thinkin' in your innocence it 's all werry capital. It 's a 
dreadful trial to a father's feelin's, that 'ere, Sammy." 
He is troubled by an obstinate suspicion that he himself 
is especially marked out as an object for the machina- 
tions of widows. In a contemptuous account of a jour- 
ney he made on a railroad, he says, " I wos locked up 
in a close carriage with a living widdur ; and I believe 



CHARLES DICKENS. 71 

it wos only because we wos alone, and there wos no 
clergyman in the conweyance, that that 'ere widdur 
did n't marry me before we reached the half-way sta- 
tion." He is a coachman of forty years, standing, and 
accordingly has a wise scorn of all railroads. " As for 
the ingein," he says, " as is always a pourin' out red hot 
coals at night, and black smoke in the day, the sensiblest 
thing it does, in my opinion, is ven there 's something in 
the vay, and it sets up that frightful scream vich seems 
to say, now here 's two hundred and forty passengers in 
the werry greatest extremity of danger, and here 's their 
two hundred and forty screams in vun." He is, indeed, 
the very Lord Burleigh of low life ; and from those par- 
oxysms of inward chuckles, — which generally termi- 
nated in " as near an approach to a choke as an elderly 
gentleman can with safety sustain," — through all the 
variety of his sayings and doings, to his earnest exhor- 
tation that Sam should spell Weller with a V, he never 
loses his substantial personality, never becomes anything 
but Tony Weller. 

Much of Dickens's most exquisite and most exube- 
rant humor is displayed in representing characters com- 
pounded of vanity, conceit, and assurance. His Artful 
Dodgers and Mr. Baileys are cases in point. They re- 
mind you of the child who ran away from his parents 
when he was only a year old, because he understood 



72 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

they intended to call him Caleb. The little, thievish, 
ragged Dodger, when brought before the police court, 
points to the judge, and politely requests to be informed 
" who is that old file up there ;" and warns the court not 
to keep him long, as he has an engagement to dine with 
the " wice-president of the House of Commons." This 
conceit, varied according to age and character, mingles 
with the other peculiarities of the two Wellers, John Wil- 
lett, Mr. Mantalini, and a score of others. There is Sim 
Tapper tit, the sublime apprentice, conceit and bathos 
embodied, who is troubled by his soul's getting into his 
head, and disturbed by " inward workings after a higher 
calling" than making locks. Mr. Kenwigs, in Nicholas 
Nickleby, is an elderly Tappertit, whose discourse is 
pitched on a more uniform key of fustian. But Mr. 
Richard Swiveller is probably the most splendid speci- 
men of the class, and is a fine example of the felicity 
with which Dickens can tread the dizziest edges of char- 
acterization without sinking into mere caricature. Dick 
is a sort of shabby Sir Harry Wildair, a reckless, 
feather-brained, good-natured vagabond, with no depth 
of guile, and whose irregularities are the result of idle- 
ness, vanity, egotism, and a great flow of spirits. With 
a vast opinion of his own abilities, he is still overreached 
by every knave he encounters, and his life is accordingly 
a descent from one " crusher" to another. He is so vain 



CHARLES DICKENS. 73 

that he almost believes his own self-exalting lies ; and he 
cannot possibly see things as they are. When the old 
grandfather is disturbed by the demands of his graceless 
grandson for money, Dick is very much surprised that 
the "jolly old grandfather should decline to fork out 
with that cheerful readiness which is always so pleasant 
and agreeable at his time of life." His head is full of 
scraps of songs and plays, which he has a singular felic- 
itous infelicity in quoting to sustain the sentiment of 
the moment ; and his slang, ever accompanying his sen- 
timent, is as characteristic as the soil on his linen, or 
the marks of Time's " effacing fingers" on his flash coat. 
When jilted by Miss Wackles, he says, in parting, " I 
go away with feelings that may be conceived, but cannot 
be described, feeling within myself the desolating truth 
that my best affections have received this night a sti- 
ller ;" but he then adds, from the promptings of his 
vanity, and with reference to his proposed suit to little 
Nell, " that a young girl of wealth and beauty is grow- 
ing up at the present moment for me, and has requested 
her next of kin to propose for my hand, which, having a 
kindness for some members of her family, I have con- 
sented to promise. It 's a gratifying circumstance, that 
you 11 be glad to hear, that a young and lovely girl is 
growing into a woman expressly on my account, and is 
now saving up for me." Dick's imaginative vanity 



74 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

absolutely deceives his own senses. He calls a fight, in 
which his own face is damaged, a festive scene ; he asks 
his companion in punch to pass the rosy wine ; he pays 
for his liquor by solemnly advising the boy at the bar 
never to touch spirits ; and tells a stranger, whom he 
designs to dupe, that the wing of friendship must not 
moult a feather. Sir Epicure Mammon himself hardly 
realizes with more fulness his gorgeous visions of glut- 
tony and avarice, than the images of all that is unreal in 
dissipation succeed each other as facts in poor Dick's 
helter-skelter brain. 

Among the various characters of Dickens, there is one 
class, which, disagreeing in many things, agree in being 
the tormentors of social life. They are persons whom 
the law does not touch, but, compared with some of 
them, highwaymen may be considered public benefac- 
tors. As ladies always have the precedence, we will 
pass over the currish attorney, Brass, and the coarse 
scoundrel, Squeers; the snapping, hissing hatred of 
Quilp, and the creamy villany of Pecksniff; in order to 
do fit honor to that miracle of mingled weakness, pru- 
dery, and malice, the incomparable Miss Miggs. She 
is an elderly maiden, who, by some strange neglect on 
the part of mankind, has been allowed to remain unmar- 
ried. This neglect might in some small degree be ac- 
counted for by the fact that her person and disposition 



CHARLES DICKENS. 75 

came within the range of Mr. Tappertit's epithet of 
"scraggy." She had various ways of wreaking her 
hatred upon the other sex, the most cruel of which was 
in often honoring them with her company and discourse. 
Her feeling for the wrongs of woman was deep and 
strong, and she had been known to wish that the whole 
race would die off, that men might be brought to appre- 
ciate the real value of the blessings by which they set 
so little store ; and averred, " if she could obtain a fair 
round number of virgins, say ten thousand, to follow her 
example, she would, to spite mankind, hang, drown, stab, 
or poison herself, with a joy past expression." When 
she watches at the window for the return of Sim Tap- 
pertit, with the intention of betraying him, she is de- 
scribed as "having an expression of face in which a 
great number of opposite ingredients, such as mischief, 
cunuing, malice, triumph, and patient expectation, were 
all mixed up together in a kind of physiognomical 
punch ;" and as composing herself to wait and listen, 
" like some fair ogress, who has set a trap, and was 
waiting for a nibble from a plump young traveller." 
Dickens, in this character, well represents how such 
seemingly insignificant malignants as Miss Miggs can 
become the pest of families ; and that, though full of 
weakness and malignity, they can be proud of their vir- 



7b NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

tue and religion, and make slander the prominent ele- 
ment of their pious conversation. 

Few novelists excel in the finer shades of character, 
in the exhibition of those minor traits which the eye of 
genius alone can detect. Much of the most refined 
humor of Dickens comes from his insight into the subtle- 
ties of the ludicrous. This penetration of vision is often 
shown when the humor seems broad even to farcical 
excess, and especially when he makes a transparent 
hypocrite speak as if he were playing a deep game. 
Squeers, for instance, is a thoroughly vulgar rascal, but 
he has a dim sense that some men are swayed by moral 
and sympathetic considerations, and he accordingly 
adopts what he deems the language of virtue and reli- 
gion when he intends some peculiarly infamous trick. 
His mode of translating morality and affection into his 
own vocabulary of villany is richly ludicrous. When 
his hopeful son, Master Wackford Squeers, catches poor 
Smike, the exulting parent exclaims, — " You always 
keep on the same path, and do things that you see 
your father do, and when you die you will go right slap 
to heaven, and be asked no questions." Snawley and 
Squeers know each other to be scoundrels, yet they ever 
preserve in their colloquies a clumsy affectation of senti- 
ment and conscience. Snawley, who is hired to entrap 
poor Smike, effects his purpose by claiming the boy as 



CHARLES DICKENS. 77 

his son. When he meets Squeers he indulges in a com- 
mendable strain of snivelling eloquence on the beauty 0/ 
natural affection. " It only shows what natur is, sir," 
said Mr. Squeers. " She 's a rum 'un, is natur." — " She 
is a holy thing," murmured Snawley. — "I believe you," 
added Mr. Squeers, with a moral sigh ; " I should like 
to know how we could get along without her. Natur," 
he said, growing solemn, " is more easily conceived than 
described. ! what a blessed thing, sir, to be in a state 
of natur." 

Brass, in the Old Curiosity Shop, a knave com- 
pounded of hawk and puppy, who fawns, cheats, and 
sentimentalizes through the whole book, has become so 
accustomed to this grotesque affectation of excellence, 
that it always flows from his lips when he speaks with- 
out reflection. He lays a trap to make poor Kit Nubbles 
appear a thief, and really appears measurelessly horror- 
stricken when the money is found in the boy's posses- 
sion. " And this," he cries, clasping his hands, " this is 
the world, that turns upon its own axis, and has lunar 
influences, and revolutions round heavenly bodies, and 
various games of that sort ! This is human natur, is 
it?" Pecksniff, again, is so thoroughly impregnated 
with the spirit of falsehood, that he is moral even in 
drunkenness, and canting even in shame and discovery. 

Much of the humor of Dickens is identical with his 



78 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

style. In this the affluence of his fancy in suggestive 
phrases and epithets is finely displayed ; and he often 
flashes the impression of a character or a scene upon the 
mind by a few graphic verbal combinations. When 
Ealph Nickleby says " God bless you," to his nephew, 
" the words stick in his thoat, as if unused to the pas- 
sage." When Tigg clasped Mr. Pecksniff in the dark, 
that worthy gentleman " found himself collared by some- 
thing which smelt like several damp umbrellas, a barrel 
of beer, a cask of warm brandy and water, and a small 
parlor full of tobacco-smoke, mixed." Mrs. Todgers, 
when she desires to make Euth Pinch know her station, 
surveys her with a look of " genteel grimness." A 
widow of a deceased brother of Martin Chuzzlewit is 
described as one, who, " being almost supernaturally dis- 
agreeable, and having a dreary face, a bony figure, and a 
masculine voice, was, in right of these qualities, called a 
strong-minded woman." Mr. Eichard Swiveller no 
sooner enters a room than the nostrils of the company 
are saluted by a strong smell of gin and lemon-peel. 
Mr. George Chuzzlewit, a person who over-fed himself, 
is sketched as a gentleman with such an obvious dispo- 
sition to pimples, that " the bright spots on his cravat, 
the rich pattern of his waistcoat, and even his glittering 
trinkets, seemed to have broken out upon him, and not 
to have come into existence comfortably." Felicities like 



CHARLES DICKENS. 79 

these, Dickens squanders with a prodigality which re- 
duces their relative value, and makes the generality of 
style-mongers poor indeed. 

It is difficult to say whether Dickens is more success- 
ful in humor or pathos. Many prefer his serious to his 
comic scenes. It is certain that his genius can as read- 
ily draw tears as provoke laughter, Sorrow, want, pov- 
erty, pain, and death ; the affections which cling to earth 
and those which rise above it ; he represents always 
with power, and often with marvellous skill. His style, 
in the serious moods of his mind, has a harmony of flow 
which often glides unconsciously into metrical arrange- 
ment ; and is full of those words 

" Which fall as soft as snow on the sea, 
And melt in the heart as instantly." 

One source of his pathos is the intense and purified con- 
ception he has of moral beauty, of that beauty which 
comes from a thoughtful brooding over the most solemn 
and affecting realities of life. The character of little 
Nell is an illustration. The simplicity of this creation, 
framed as it is from the finest elements of human nature, 
and the unambitious mode of its development through 
the motley scenes of the Old Curiosity Shop, are calcu- 
lated to make us overlook its rare merit as a work of 
high poetic genius. Amid the wolfish malignity of 
Quilp, the sugared meanness of Brass, the roaring con- 



80 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

viviality of Swiveller, amid scenes of selfishness and 
shame, of passion and crime, this delicate creation moves 
along, unsullied, purified, pursuing the good in the sim- 
ple earnestness of a pure heart, gliding to the tomb as to 
a sweet sleep, and leaving in every place that her pres- 
ence beautifies the marks of celestial footprints. Sor- 
rows such as hers, over which so fine a sentiment sheds 
its consecrations, have been well said to be ill-bartered 
for the garishness of joy ; " for they win us softly from 
life, and fit us to die smiling." 

In addition to this refined perception of moral beauty, 
he has great tragic power. It would be useless, in our 
limits, to attempt to give illustrations of his closeness to 
nature in delineating the deeper passions ; his profound 
observation of the workings of the soul when stained 
with crime and looking forward to death ; his skill in 
gifting remorse, fear, avarice, hatred and revenge, with 
their appropriate language ; and his subtle appreciation 
of the influence exercised by different moods of the mind 
in modifying the appearances of external objects. In 
these the poet always appears through the novelist, and 
we hardly know whether imagination or observation con- 
tributes most to the effect. 

In closing these desultory remarks on Dickens, and 
the department of literature of which he is the greatest 
living representative, it may not be irrelevant to express 



CHARLES DICKENS. 81 

a regret that we have not a class of novels illustrative of 
American life and character, which does some justice to 
both. Novelists we have in perilous abundance, as 
Egypt had locusts ; some of them unexcelled in the art 
of preparing a dish of fiction by a liberal admixture of 
the horrible and sentimental ; and some few who display 
talents and accomplishments of a higher order ; but a 
series of national novels, illustrative of the national life, 
the production of men penetrated with an American 
spirit without being Americanisms, we can hardly plume 
ourselves upon possessing. The American has hereto- 
fore appeared in romance chiefly to be libeled or cari- 
catured. He has been represented as an acute knave, 
expressing the sentiments of a worldling in the slang of 
an ale-house, and principally occupied in peddling Con- 
necticut nutmegs, wooden clocks, and tin ware. That 
Sam Slick, Nimrod Wildfire, and the Ethiopian Min- 
strels, do not comprehend the whole wealth and raciness 
of life as it is in the North, the South, and the West, 
might easily be demonstrated if a man of power would 
undertake the task. But one would almost suppose, 
from hearing the usual despairing criticism of the day, 
that in the United States the national novel was an 
impossible creation. Are there, then, no materials here 
for the romantic and heroic, — nothing over which poe- 
try can lovingly hover, — nothing of sorrow; for pathos to 
6 



82 NOVELS AND NOVELISTS : 

convert into beauty, — no fresh individualities of disposi- 
tion over which humor, born of pathos, can pour its 
floods of genial mirth, — no sweet household ties, no 
domestic affections, no high thoughts, no great passions, 
no sorrow, sin, and death ? Has our past no story to 
tell ? Is there nothing of glory in the present, nothing 
of hope in the future ? In no country, indeed, is there a 
broader field opened to the delineator of character and 
manners than in our own land. Look at our society, 
the only society where the whole people are alive, — 
alive with intelligence and passion, — every man's indi- 
vidual life mingling with the life of the nation, — ava- 
rice, cruelty, pride, folly, ignorance, in a ceaseless con- 
test with great virtues, and noble aims, and thoughts 
that reach upward to the ideal. In the noise and tumult 
of that tremendous struggle, a man of genius not blinded 
by its dust or deafened by its din, at once an actor in 
life and a spectator of it, might discover the materials of 
the deepest tragedy and the finest and broadest humor ; 
might hear, amid the roar and confusion, the " still, sad 
music of humanity ;" might see, through all the rancor 
and madness of partisan warfare, the slow evolution of 
right principles ; might send his soul along that tide of 
impetuous passion in which novelties are struggling with 
prejudices, without being overwhelmed in its foaming 
flood ; and in the comprehensive grasp of his intellect 



CHARLES DICKENS. 83 

might include all classes, all sects, all professions, mak- 
ing them stand out on his luminous page in the clear 
light of reality, doing justice to all by allowing each its 
own costume and language, compelling Falsehood to 
give itself the lie, and Pride to stand abased before its 
own image, and guided in all his pictures of life and 
character by a spirit at once tolerant, just, generous, 
humane, and national. 



LECTUEE III.* 



WIT AND HUMOR. 

It has been justly objected to New England society, 
that it is too serious and prosaic. It cannot take a joke. 
It demands the reason of all things, or their value in the 
current coin of the land. It is nervous, fidgety, unre- 
posing, full of trouble. Striving hard to make even reli- 
gion a torment, it clothes in purple and fine linen its 
apostles of despair. Business is followed with such a 
devouring intensity of purpose, that it results as often in 
dyspepsia as in wealth. We are so overcome with the 
serious side of things, that our souls rarely come out in 
irrepressible streams of merriment. The venerable King 
Cole would find few subjects here to acknowledge his 
monarchy of mirth. In the foppery of our utilitarianism, 
we would frown down all recreations which have not a 
logical connection with mental improvement or purse 
improvement. For those necessary accompaniments of 

# Delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, 
December, 1845. 



WIT AND HTJMOR. 85 

all life out of the Insane Asylum, — qualities which the 
most serious and sublime of Christian poets has described 
with the utmost witchery of his fancy, — 

" Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles, 
Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles, 
Sport, that wrinkled Care derides, 
And Laughter holding both his sides," — 

for these we have the suspicious glance, the icy speech, 
the self-involved and mysterious look. We are gulled 
by all those pretences which require a vivid sense of the 
ludicrous to be detected ; and with all our boasted intel- 
ligence, there is hardly a form of quackery and fanati- 
cism which does not thrive better by the side of our 
schools and colleges than anywhere else. And the 
reason is, we lack generally the faculty or feeling of 
ridicule, — the counterfeit-detector all over the world. 
We have, perhaps, sufficient respect for the great, the 
majestic, and the benevolent ; but we are deficient in the 
humorous insight to detect roguery and pretence under 
their external garbs. As we cannot laugh at our own 
follies, so we cannot endure being laughed at. A Grub- 
street scribbler, tossing at us from a London garret a 
few lightning-bugs of jocularity, can set our whole pop- 
ulation in a flame. Public indignation is the cheapest 
article of domestic manufacture. There is no need of a 
tariff to protect that. We thus give altogether too much 



86 WIT AND HUMOR. 

importance to unimportant things, — breaking butterflies 
on the wheel, and cannonading grasshoppers ; and our 
dignity continually exhales in our spasmodic efforts to 
preserve it. 

Now it is an undoubted fact that the principle of 
Mirth is as innate in the mind as any other original 
faculty. The absence of it, in individuals or communi- 
ties, is a defect ; for there are various forms of error and 
imposture which wit, and wit alone, can expose and 
punish. Without a well-trained capacity to perceive the 
ludicrous, the health suffers, both of the body and the 
mind; seriousness dwindles into asceticism, sobriety 
degenerates into bigotry, and the natural order of things 
gives way to the vagaries of distempered imaginations. 
" He who laughs," said the mother of Goethe, " can com- 
mit no deadly sin." The Emperor Titus thought he had 
lost a day if he had passed it without laughing. Sterne 
contends that every laugh lengthens the term of our lives. 
Wisdom, which represents the marriage of Truth and 
Virtue, is by no means synonymous with gravity. She 
is L'Allegro as well as II Penseroso, and jests as well 
as preaches. The wise men of old have sent most of 
their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff 
of apothegm or epigram ; and the proverbs of nations, 
which embody the common-sense of nations, have the 
brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit. Almost 



WIT AND HUMOR. 87 

every sensible remark on a folly is a witty remark. Wit 
is thus often but the natural language of wisdom, view- 
ing life with a piercing and passionless eye. Indeed, 
nature and society are so replete with startling contrasts, 
that wit often consists in the mere statement and com- 
parison of facts ; as when Hume says, that the ancient 
Muscovites wedded their wives with a whip instead of a 
ring ; as when Voltaire remarks, that Penn's treaty with 
the Indians was the only one ever made between civil- 
ized men and savages not sanctioned by an oath, and 
the only one that ever was kept. In the same vein of 
wise sarcasm is the observation that France under the 
Ancient Regime was an absolute monarchy moderated 
by songs, and that Russia is a despotism tempered by 
assassination ; or the old English proverb, that he who 
preaches war is the devil's chaplain. 

In view of this ludicrous side of things, perceived by 
"Wit and Humor, I propose in this lecture to discourse 
of Mirth, — its philosophy, its literature, its influence. 
The breadth of the theme forbids a complete treatment 
of it, for to Wit and Humor belong much that is impor- 
tant in history and most agreeable in letters. The mere 
mention of a few of the great wits and humorists of the 
world will show the extent of the subject, viewed simply 
in its literary aspect ; for to Mirth belong the exhaust- 
less fancy and sky-piercing buffooneries of Aristophanes ; 



83 WIT AND HUMOR. 

the matchless irony of Lucian ; the stern and terrible 
satire of Juvenal; the fun-drunken extravagances of 
.Rabelais ; the self-pleased chuckle of Montaigne ; the 
farcical caricature of Scarron ; the glowing and spark- 
ling verse of Dryden ; the genial fun of Addison ; the 
scoffing subtilties of Butler ; the aerial merriment of 
Sterne ; the hard brilliancy and stinging emphasis of 
Pope ; the patient glitter of Congreve ; the teasing 
mockery of Voltaire ; the polished sharpness of Sheridan ; 
the wise drolleries of Sydney Smith ; the sly, shy, elu- 
sive, ethereal humor of Lamb ; the short, sharp, flashing 
scorn of Macaulay ; the careless gayety of Beranger ; 
the humorous sadness of Hood ; and the comic creations, 
various almost as human nature, which have peopled the 
imaginations of Europe with everlasting forms of the 
ludicrous, from the time of Shakspeare and Cervantes 
to that of Scott and Dickens. Now all these writers 
either represented or influenced their age. Their works 
are as valuable to the historian as to the lover of the 
comic ; for they show us what people in different ages 
laughed at, and thus indicate the periods at which forms 
of faith and government, and social follies and vices, 
passed from objects of reverence or respect into subjects 
of ridicule and contempt. And only in Dr. Barrow's 
celebrated description of facetiousness, "the greatest 
proof of mastery over language," says Mackintosh, "ever 



WIT AND HUMOR. 89 

given by an English writer," can be represented the 
manifold forms and almost infinite range of their mirth. 
" Sometimes it lieth in pat allusion to a known story, or 
in seasonable application of a trivial saying, or in forging 
an apposite tale ; sometimes it playeth in words and 
phrases, taking advantage from the ambiguity of their 
sense or the affinity of their sound ; sometimes it is 
wrapped up in a dress of humorous expression ; some- 
times it lurketh under an odd similitude ; sometimes it 
is lodged in a sly question, in a smart answer, in a 
quirkish reason, in a shrewd intimation, in cunningly 
diverting or cleverly retorting an objection ; sometimes 
it is couched in a bold scheme of speech, in a tart irony, 
in a lusty hyperbole, in a startling metaphor, in a plau- 
sible reconciling of contradictions, or in acute nonsense ; 
sometimes a scenical representation of persons or things, 
a counterfeit speech, a mimical look or gesture, passeth 
for it; sometimes an affected simplicity, sometimes a 
presumptuous bluntness, giveth it being ; sometimes it 
riseth only from a lucky hitting upon what is strange ; 
sometimes from a crafty wresting obvious matter to the 
purpose. Often it consisteth in one hardly knows what, 
and springeth up one can hardly tell how, being answer- 
able to the numberless rovings of fancy and windings of 
language." 

To this description, at once so subtle and so compre- 



90 WIT AND HUMOR. 

hensive, little can be added. It remains, however, to 
indicate some characteristics which separate wit from 
humor. Neither seems a distinct faculty of the mind, 
but rather a sportive exercise of intellect and fancy, 
directed by the sentiment of Mirth, and changing its 
character with the variations of individual passions and 
peculiarities. The essence of the ludicrous consists in 
surprise, — in unexpected turns of feeling and explosions 
of thought, — often by bringing dissimilar things together 
with a shock; — as when some wit called Boyle, the 
celebrated philosopher, the father of Chemistry and 
brother of the Earl of Cork ; or as when the witty editor 
of a penny paper took for the motto of his journal, — 
" The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, the price of 
the Star is only one cent." When Northcote, the sculp- 
tor, was asked what he thought of George the Fourth, he 
answered that he did not know him. " But," persisted 
his querist, " his majesty says he knows you." " Know 
me," said Northcote, " pooh ! pooh ! that's all his brag !" 
Again, Phillips, while travelling in this country, said 
that he once met a republican so furious against mon- 
archs that he would not even wear a crown to his hat. 
The expression of uncontrolled self-will is often witty as 
well as wicked, from this element of unexpectedness. 
Peter the Great, observing the number of lawyers in 
Westminster Hall, remarked that he had but two lawyers 



WIT AND HUMOR. 91 

in his whole dominions, and that he intended to hang 
one of them as soon as he got home. 

Wit was originally a general name for all the intel- 
lectual powers, meaning the faculty which kens, per- 
ceives, knows, understands ; it was gradually narrowed 
in its signification to express merely the resemblance 
between ideas ; and lastly, to note that resemblance 
when it occasioned ludicrous surprise. It marries ideas, 
lying wide apart, by a sudden jerk of the understanding. 
Humor originally meant moisture, a signification it met- 
aphorically retains, for it is the very juice of the mind, 
oozing from the brain, and enriching and fertilizing 
wherever it falls. Wit exists by antipathy ; Humor by 
sympathy. Wit laughs at things ; Humor laughs with 
them. Wit lashes external appearances, or cunningly 
exaggerates single foibles into character ; Humor glides 
into the heart of its object, looks lovingly on the infirmi- 
ties it detects, and represents the whole man. Wit is 
abrupt, darting, scornful, and tosses its analogies in your 
face ; Humor is slow and shy, insinuating its fun into 
your heart. Wit is negative, analytical, destructive ; 
Humor is creative. The couplets of Pope are witty, but 
Sancho Panza is a humorous creation. Wit, when 
earnest, has the earnestness of passion, seeking to de- 
stroy ; Humor has the earnestness of affection, and would 
lift up what is seemingly low into our charity and love. 



92 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Wit, bright, rapid and blasting as the lightning, flashes, 
strikes and vanishes, in an instant ; Humor, warm and 
all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its objects in a 
genial and abiding light. Wit implies hatred or con- 
tempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk 
shocks of surprise, uses the whip of scorpions and the 
branding-iron, stabs, stings, pinches, tortures, goads, 
teases, corrodes, undermines; Humor implies a sure 
conception of the beautiful, the majestic and the true, by 
whose light it surveys and shapes their opposites. It is 
an humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged 
inequalities of existence, promoting tolerant views of life, 
bridging over the spaces which separate the lofty from 
the lowly, the great from the humble. Old Dr. Fuller's 
remark, that a negro is u the image of God cut in ebony," 
is humorous ; Horace Smith's inversion of it, that the 
taskmaster is " the image of the devil cut in ivory," is 
witty. Wit can coexist with fierce and malignant pas- 
sions ; but Humor demands good feeling and fellow-feel- 
ing, feeling not merely for what is above us, but for what 
is around and beneath us. When Wit and Humor are 
commingled, the result is a genial sharpness, dealing 
with its object somewhat as old Izaak Walton dealt with 
the frog he used for bait, — running the hook neatly 
through his mouth and out at his gills, and in so doing 



WIT AND HUMOR. 93 

" using him as though he loved him ! " Sydney Smith 
and Shakspeare's Touchstone are examples. 

Wit, then, being strictly an assailing and destructive 
faculty, remorselessly shooting at things from an antag- 
onist point of view, it not infrequently blends with great 
passions ; and you ever find it gleaming in the van of 
all radical and revolutionary movements against estab- 
lished opinions and institutions. In this practical, exe- 
cutive form, it is commonly called Satire ; and in this 
form it has exercised vast influence on human affairs. 
Its character has varied with the character of individual 
satirists ; in some taking the beak and talons of the 
eagle or the hawk, in others putting on the wasp and the 
dragon-fly. Too often it has but given a brighter and 
sharper edge to hatred and malignity. In a classifica- 
tion of satirical compositions, they may be included in 
two great divisions, namely, satire on human nature, and 
satire on the perversions and corruptions of human 
nature. The first and most terrible of these, satire on 
human nature, dipping its pen in " Scorn's fiery poison," 
represents man as a bundle of vices and weaknesses, 
considers his aspirations merely as provocatives of malig- 
nant scoffing, and debases whatever is most beautiful 
and majestic in life, by associating it with whatever is 
vilest and most detestable. This is not satire on men, 
but on Man. The laughter which it creates is impish 



94 WIT AND HUMOR. 

and devilish, the very mirth of fiends, and its wit the 
gleam and glare of infernal light. Two great dramatists, 
Shakspeare and Goethe, have represented this phase of 
satire artistically, in the characters of Iago and Mephis- 
topheles ; and Dean Swift and Lord Byron have done it 
personally, in Gulliver and Don Juan ; — Swift, from fol- 
lowing the instincts of a diseased heart, and the analo- 
gies of an impure fancy ; Byron, from recklessness and 
capricious misanthropy. Only, however, in Iago and 
Mephistopheles do we find the perfection of this kind of 
wit, — keen, nimble, quick-sighted, feelingless, under- 
mining all virtue and all beauty with foul suspicions and 
fiendish mockeries. The subtle mind of Iago glides to 
its object with the soft celerity of a panther's tread ; that 
of Mephistopheles darts with the velocity of a tiger's 
spring. Both are malignant intelligences, infinitely 
ingenious in evil, infinitely merciless in purpose ; and 
wherever their scorching sarcasm falls, it blights and 
blackens all the humanities of life 

Now for this indiscriminate jibing and scoffing at hu- 
man nature there can be no excuse. There is no surer 
sign of a bad heart than for a writer to find delight in 
degrading his species. But still there are legitimate 
objects for the most terrible and destructive weapons of 
satire ; and these are the corruptions and crimes of the 
world, whether embodied in persons or institutions. 



WIT AND HUMOR. yo 

Here wit has achieved great victories, victories for hu- 
manity and truth. Brazen impudence and guilt have 
been discrowned and blasted by its bolts. It has over- 
thrown establishments where selfishness, profligacy and 
meanness, had hived for ages. It has felt its way in 
flame along every nerve and artery of social oppressors, 
whose tough hearts had proved invulnerable to wail and 
malediction. It has torn aside the masks which have 
given temporary ascendency to every persecutor calling 
himself Priest, and every robber calling himself King. 
It has scourged the bigot and the hypocrite, and held up 
to "grinning infamy" the knaveries and villanies of 
corrupt governments. It has made many a pretension 
of despotism, once unquestioned, a hissing and a by-word 
all over the earth. Tyrannies, whose iron pressure had 
nearly crushed out the life of a people, — tyrannies, 
which have feared neither man nor God, and withstood 
prayers and curses which might almost have brought 
down Heaven's answering lightnings, — these, in the 
very bravery of their guilt, in the full halloo of their 
whole pack of unbridled passions, have been smitten by 
the shaft of the satirist, and passed from objects of hatred 
and terror into targets of ridicule and scorn. As men 
neither fear nor respect what has been made contempti- 
ble, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as 
well as detestable. Armies cannot protect it then ; and 



96 WIT AND HUMOR. 

walls which have remained impenetrable to cannon have 
fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt. 

Satirists generally appear in the dotage of opinions 
and institutions, when the state has become an embodied 
falsehood, and the church a name ; when society has 
dwindled into a smooth lie, and routine has become 
religion ; when appearance has taken the place of reality, 
and wickedness has settled down into weakness. If we 
take the great comic writers who represent their age, we 
shall find that satire, with them, is the expression of 
their contempt for the dead forms of a once living faith. 
Faith in Paganism at the time of Homer as contrasted 
with the time of Aristophanes, — faith in Catholicism in 
Dante's age as contrasted with the age of Voltaire, — 
faith in the creations of the imagination at the time of 
Spenser as contrasted with the age of Pope, — in some 
degree measure the difference between these writers, and 
explain why the ridicule of the one should be pitched at 
what awakened the reverence of the other. Great satir- 
ists, appearing in the decay of an old order of civiliza- 
tion, descend on their time as ministers of vengeance, 
intellectual Alarics, " planetary plagues," 

" When Jove 

Shall o'er some high-viced city hang his poison 
In the sick air." 

They prepare the way for better things by denouncing 



WIT AND HUMOR. 97 

what has become worn, and wasted, and corrupt, — that 
from the terrible wreck of old falsehoods may spring 
" truths that wake to perish never." With invincible 
courage they do their work, and wherever they see 
accredited hypocrisy or shameless guilt, they will speak 
to it, 

11 Though Hell itself should gape, 
And bid them hold their peace." 

Thus we shall find that many satirists have been radi- 
cal legislators, and that many jests have become history. 
The annals of the eighteenth century would be very im- 
perfect that did not give a large space to Voltaire, who 
was as much a monarch as Charles the Twelfth or Louis 
the Fourteenth. Satirical compositions, floating about 
among a people, have more than once produced revolu- 
tions. They are sown as dragon's teeth ; they spring up 
armed men. The author of the ballad of Lilliburlero 
boasted that he had rhymed King James the Second out 
of his dominions. England, under Charles II., was 
governed pretty equally by roues and wit-snappers. A 
joke hazarded by royal lips on a regal object has some- 
times plunged kingdoms into war ; for dull monarch s 
generally make their repartees through the cannon's 
mouth. The biting jests of Frederick the Great on the 
Empress Elizabeth and Madame de Pompadour were 
instrumental in bringing down upon his- dominions the 



yo WIT AND HUMOR. 

armies of Russia and France. The downfall of the 
French monarchy was occasioned primarily by its becom- 
ing contemptible through its vices. No government, 
whether evil or good, can long exist after it has ceased 
to excite respect and begun to excite hilarity. Ministers 
of state have been repeatedly laughed out of office. 
Where Scorn points its scoffing finger, Servility itself 
may well be ashamed to fawn. In this connection, I 
trust no one will consider me capable of making a politi- 
cal allusion, or to be wanting in respect for the dead, if 
I refer in illustration to a late administration of our own 
government, — I mean that which retired on the fourth 
of March, 1845. Now, during that administration meas- 
ures of the utmost importance were commenced or con- 
summated ; the country was more generally prosperous 
than it had been for years ; there were no spectacles of 
gentlemen taking passage for France or Texas, with 
bags of the public gold in their valises ; the executive 
power was felt in every part of the land ; and yet the 
whole thing was hailed with a shout of laughter, ringing 
to the remotest villages of the east and the west. Every- 
body laughed, and the only difference between its nomi- 
nal supporters and its adversaries was, that whereas one 
party laughed outright, the other laughed in their 
sleeves. Nothing could have saved such an administra- 
tion from downfall, for whatever may have been its 



WIT AND HUMOR. 99 

intrinsic merits, it was still considered not so much a 
government as a gigantic joke. 

And now, in further illustration of the political impor- 
tance of satirists, and their appearance in periods of 
national degradation, allow me to present a few leaves 
from literary history. The great satirical age of Eng- 
lish literature, as you are all aware, dates from the resto- 
ration of Charles II., in 1660, and runs to the reign of 
George II., a period of about seventy years. During 
this period flourished Dryden, Pope, Swift, Young, Gay, 
and Arbuthnot, and during this period the national mo- 
rality was at its lowest ebb. It was an age peculiarly 
calculated to develop an assailing spirit in men of talent, 
for there were numberless vices which deserved to be 
assailed. Authors moved in, or very near, the circle of 
high life and political life, in the full view of the follies 
and crimes of both. They were accustomed to see Man 
in his artificial state, — busy in intrigue, pursuing selfish 
ends by unscrupulous means, counting virtue and honor 
as ornamental non-existences, looking on religion as a 
very good thing for the poor, conceiving of poetry as 
lying far back in tradition or out somewhere in the coun- 
try, hiding his hate in a smile, pocketing his infamy 
with a bow. They saw that the star of the earl, the 
ermine of the judge, and the surplice of the prelate, 
instead of representing nobility, justice and piety, were 



100 WIT AND HUMOR. 

often but the mere badge of apostasy, the mere livery of 
liberticide. They saw that every person seemed to have 
his price, and that if a man ascertained that he himself 
was not worth buying, he was perfectly willing to sell 
his sister or his wife, and strutted about, after the sale, 
bedizened with infamy, as happy and as pleasant a gen- 
tleman as one would wish to meet on a summer's day. 
It was from the depth of such infamy as this last that 
the Duke of Marlborough emerged, the first general of 
his time. In such a mass of dissimulation, effrontery, 
peculation, fraud, — in such a dearth of high thoughts 
and great passions, — in such a spectacle of moral non- 
chalance, dignified imbecility, and elegant shamelessness, 
— the satirical poet could find numberless targets for the 
scorn-winged arrows of his ridicule ; could sometimes 
feel that he, too, had his part in the government of the 
country ; and with honest delight could often exclaim, 
with Pope, — 

" I own I 'm proud — I must be proud, to see 
Men not afraid of God afraid of me." 

Among these satirists, Pope, of the age of Queen 
Anne, was by far the most independent, unflinching and 
merciless. Inferior to Dryden, perhaps, in genius, he 
was still placed in a position which rendered him more 
independent of courts and parties, and his invective, 
unlike that of Dryden, was shot directly at crime and 



WIT AND HUMOR. 101 

folly, without respect to persons. Although he was 
terribly bitter when galled and goaded by personal oppo- 
nents, and, in his satire, too often spent his strength 
against mere imbecility and wretchedness ; yet, take him 
as he is, the great representative writer of his time ; the 
uncompromising smiter of powerful guilt, the sturdy 
defender of humble virtue ; the satirist of dukes, but the 
eulogist of the Man of Ross ; his works the most perfect 
specimens of brilliant good sense, his life free from the 
servility which hitherto had disgraced authorship ; and 
though charity may find much in him that needs to be 
forgiven, though justice may even sometimes class him 
with those moral assassins who wear, like Cloten, their 
daggers in their mouths, yet still great merit cannot be 
denied to the poet and the man who scourged hypocrisy 
and baseness, at a time when baseness paved the way 
to power, and hypocrisy distributed the spoils of fraud. 
The courage exercised by such a satirist was by no 
means insignificant. The enmities which Pope provoked 
were almost as numerous as knaves and fools. After 
the publication of the Dunciad, he was generally accom- 
panied in the street by a huge Irishman, armed with a 
club, so that if any lean-witted rhymer or fat-fisted mem- 
ber of Parliament, whom he had gibbeted with his sar- 
casm, desired to be revenged on his person, the brawny 
Hibernian had full commission to conduct that oontro- 



102 



WIT AND HUMOR. 



versy, according to the most approved logic of the shil- 
laleh. 

The other great satirist of the age of Queen Anne 
was Dean Swift, a "darker and a fiercer spirit" than 
Pope, and one who has been stigmatized as " the apos- 
tate politician, the perjured lover, and the ribald priest, 
— a heart burning with hatred against the whole human 
race, a mind richly laden with images from the gutter 
and the lazar-house." Swift has been justly called 
the greatest of libellers, — a libeller of persons, a libeller 
of human nature, and, we may add, a libeller of himself. 
He delighted to drag all the graces and sanctities of life 
through the pools and puddles of his own mind, and 
after such a baptism of mud, to hold them up as speci- 
mens of what dreamers called the inborn beauty of the 
human soul. He was a bad man, depraved in the very 
centre of his nature ; but he was still one of the greatest 
wits, and, after a fashion, one of the greatest humorists, 
that ever existed. His most effective weapon was irony, 
a kind of saturnine, sardonic wit, having the self-posses- 
sion, complexity and continuity of humor, without its 
geniality ; and, in the case of Swift, steeped rather in 
the vitriol of human bitterness than the milk of human 
kindness. Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a 
compliment ; insinuating the most galling satire under 
the phraseology of panegyric ; placing its victim naked 



WIT AND HUMOR. 103 

on a bed of briars and thistles, thinly covered with rose- 
leaves ; adorning his brow with a crown of gold, which 
burns into his brain ; teasing, and fretting, and riddling 
him through and through, with incessant discharges of 
hot shot from a masked battery ; laying bare the most 
sensitive and shrinking nerves of his mind, and then 
blandly touching them with ice, or smilingly pricking 
them with needles. Wit, in this form, cannot be with- 
stood, even by the hardest of heart and the emptiest of 
head. It eats and rusts into its victim. Swift used it 
with incomparable skill, sometimes against better men 
than himself, sometimes against the public plunderer and 
the titled knave, the frauds of quackery and the abuses 
of government. His morose, mocking and cynical spirit, 
combined with his sharp insight into practical life, ena- 
bled him to preserve an inimitable coolness of manner, 
while he stated the most nonsensical or atrocious para- 
doxes as if they were self-evident truisms. He generally 
destroyed his antagonists by ironically twisting their 
opinions into a form of hideous caricature, and then set- 
ting forth grave mockeries of argument in their defence ; 
imputing, by inference, the most diabolical doctrines to 
his opponents, and then soberly attempting to show that 
they were the purest offspring of justice and benevolence. 
Nothing can be more perfect of its kind, nothing more 
vividly suggests the shallowness of moral and religious 



104 WIT AND HUMOR. 

principle which characterized his age, nothing subjects 
practical infidelity to an ordeal of more tormenting and 
wasting ridicule, than his ironical tract, giving a state- 
ment of reasons w T hy, on the whole, it would be impolitic 
to abolish the Christian religion in England. This is 
considered by Mackintosh the finest piece of irony in the 
English language. 

Swift's most laughable specimen of " acute nonsense" 
was his prophecy that a certain quack almanac-maker, 
by the name of Partridge, would die on a certain day. 
Partridge, who was but little disposed to die in order to 
give validity to the prediction of a rival astrologer, came 
out exultingly denying the truth of the prophecy, after 
the period fixed for his decease, and not he, had expired. 
Swift, nothing daunted, retorted in another tract, in 
which he set forth a large array of quirkish reasons to 
prove that Partridge was dead, and ingeniously argued 
that the quack's own testimony to the contrary could not 
be received, as he was too notorious a liar to be enti- 
tled to belief on so important a point. 

But perhaps the most exquisite piece of irony in mod- 
ern literature, and, at the same time, the most terrible 
satire on the misgovernment of Ireland, is Swift's pam- 
phlet entitled, " A Modest Proposal to the Public, for 
Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from 
being a Burden to their Country, and for making them 



WIT AND HUMOR. 105 

Beneficial to the Public ;" — which modest proposal con- 
sisted in advising that the said children be used fox food. 
He commences with stating- that the immense number 
of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels, 
of their starving mothers, has become a public grievance, 
and that he would be a public benefactor who should 
contrive some method of making them useful to the com- 
monwealth. After showing that it is impossible to ex- 
pect that they should be able to pick up a livelihood by 
stealing much before they are six years old, and saying 
that he had been assured by merchants that a child 
under twelve years was no saleable commodity, — that 
it would not bring on 'change more than three pounds, 
while its rags and nutriments would cost four times that 
amount, — he proceeds to advise their use as food for their 
more fortunate fellow-creatures ; and as this food, from 
its delicacy, would be somewhat dear, he considers it all 
the more proper for landlords, who, as they have already 
devoured the parents, seem to have the best right to the 
children. He answers all objections to his proposal by 
mock arguments, and closes with solemnly protesting his 
own disinterestedness in making it ; and proves that he 
has no personal interest in the matter, as he has not 
himself a child by whom he can expect to get a penny, 
the youngest being nine years old ! So admirably was 
the irony sustained, that the pamphlet was quoted by a 



106 WIT AND HUMOR. 

French writer of the time, as evidencing the hopeless 
barbarity of the English nation. 

It would be easy to trace the influence of satirical 
compositions further down the course of English history; 
but enough has already been said to indicate the check 
which social and political criminals have received, from 
the presence of men capable of holding them up to the 
world's laughter and contempt. This satire, in all free 
commonwealths, has a share in the legislation and policy 
of the government ; and bad institutions and pernicious 
opinions rarely fall, until they have been pierced by its 
keen-edged mockeries, or smitten by its scathing invec- 
tives. 

The lighter follies and infirmities of human nature, as 
seen in every-day life, have afforded numberless objects 
for light-hearted or vinegar-hearted raillery, gibe, satire, 
banter and caricature. Among the foibles of men, Wit 
plays and glances, a tricksy Ariel of the intellect, full of 
mirth and mischief, laughing at all, and inspiring all to 
laugh at each other. Egotism and vanity are promi- 
nent provocations of this dunce-demolishing fun ; for a 
man, it has been truly said, is ridiculous " not so much 
for what he is, as for pretending to be what he is not." 
It is very rare to see a frank knave, or a blockhead who 
knows himself. The life of most men is passed in an 
attempt to misrepresent themselves, everybody being 



WIT AND HUMOR. 107 

bitten by an ambition to appear instead of to be. Thus 
few can visit sublime scenery without preparing before- 
hand the emotions of wonder and awe they ought to feel, 
and contriving the raptures into which they intend to 
fall. We mourn, make love, console, sentimentalize, in 
cant phrases. We guard with religious scrupulousness 
against the temptation of being betrayed into a natural 
expression of ourselves. A perception of the ludicrous 
would make us ashamed of this self-exaggerating foible, 
and save us from the cuffs and pats by which Wit occa- 
sionally reminds us of it. " Dr. Parr," said a young 
student once to the old linguist, — "let's you and I 
write a book." — " Very well," replied the doctor, " put 
in all that I know, and all that you don't know, and 
we 'd make a big one." The doctor himself was not 
free from the conceit he delighted to punish in others ; 
for satire is apt to be a glass, " in which we see every 
face but our own." He once said, in a miscellaneous 
company, " England has produced three great classical 
scholars ; the first was Bentley, the second was Porson. 
and the third modesty forbids me to mention." Occa- 
sionally egotists will strike rather hard against each 
other, as in the case of the strutting captain of a militia 
company, who once, in a fit of temporary condescension, 
invited a ragged negro to drink negus with him. " Oh ! 
certainly," rejoined the negro ; " I 'm not proud ; I 'd just 



108 WIT AND HUMOR. 

as lieves drink with a militia captain as anybody else." 
Dr. Johnson was famous for smashing the thin egg-shells 
of conceit which partly concealed the mental impotence 
of some of his auditors. One of them once shook his 
head gravely, and said he could not see the force and 
application of one of the doctor's remarks. He was 
crushed instantly by the gruff retort — " It is my busi- 
ness, sir, to give you arguments, not to give you brains." 
Sometimes the ridiculousness of a remark springs 
from the intense superficiality of its conventional conceit, 
as in the case of the young lady, who, on being once 
asked what she thought of Niagara, answered, that she 
never had beheld the falls, but had always heard them 
highly spoken of. Ignorance which deems itself pro- 
foundly wise, is also exquisitely ludicrous. A German 
prince once gave his subjects a free constitution ; at 
which they murmured continually, saying that hereto- 
fore they had paid taxes and been saved the trouble of 
government, but that now they were not only taxed 
but had to govern themselves. Wit easily unmasks the 
hypocrisy and selfishness which underlie loyal and patri- 
otic catchwords. Parr said that the toast " Church and 
King" usually meant a " church without a gospel and a 
king above the law ; " and Sydney Smith, while lashing 
some tory placemen, ebullient with loyalty, observed that 
" God save the King" meant too often, " God save my 



WIT AND HUMOR. 109 

pension and my place, God give my sisters an allowance 
out of the privy-purse, — make me clerk of the irons, let 
me survey the meltings, let me live upon the fruits of 
other men's industry, and fatten upon the plunder of the 
public." 

Again, all snivelling hypocrisy in speculation, such as 
that which, when discoursing of the world's evils, de- 
lights to call Man's sin God's providence, — all boister- 
ous noodleism in reform, whose champions would take 
scciety on their knee, as a Yankee takes a stick, and 
whittle it into shape ; — to these satire gravitates by a 
natural law. The story told by Horace Smith of the 
city miss is a good instance of a shock given to affected 
and mincing elegance. She had read much of pastoral 
life, and once made a visit into the country for the pur- 
pose of communing with a real shepherd. She at last 
discovered one, with the crook in his hand, the dog by 
his side, and the sheep disposed romantically around 
him ; but he was without the indispensable musical 
accompaniment of all poetic shepherds, the pastoral reed. 
" Ah ! gentle shepherd," softly inquired she, " tell me 
where 's your pipe." The bumpkin scratched his head, 
and murmured brokenly, " I left it at home, miss, 'cause 
I haint got no baccy ! " 

Wit is infinitely ingenious in what Barrow calls " the 
quirkish reason," and often pinches hard when it seems 



110 WIT AND HUMOR. 

most seriously urbane. Thus a gentleman once warmly 
eulogized the constancy of an absent husband in the 
presence of his loving wife. " Yes ! yes ! " assented she ; 
" he writes me letters full of the agony of affection, but 
he never remits me any money." — "I can conceive of 
that," replied the other, " for I know his love to be unre- 
mitting." Byron's defence of the selfish member of Par- 
liament is another pertinent instance : 

" has no heart, you say, but I deny it ; 

He has a heart — he gets his speeches by it." 

Satire is famous for these quiet side cuts and sympa- 
thetic impertinences. An officer of Louis XIV. was 
continually pestering him for promotion, and at last 
drew from him the peevish exclamation — " You are the 
most troublesome man in my army." — " That, please 
your majesty, is what your enemies are continually say- 
ing," was the reply. When George Wither, the Puritan 
poet, was taken prisoner by the Cavaliers, there was a 
general disposition displayed to hang him at once ; but 
Sir John Denham saved his life by saying to Charles I. 
— "I hope your majesty will not hang poor George 
Wither, for as long as he lives it can't be said that I am 
the worst poet in England." Sheridan, it is well known, 
was never free from pecuniary embarrassments. As he 
was one day hacking his face with a dull razor, he 
turned to his eldest son, and said, " Tom, if you open 



WIT AND HUMOR. Ill 

any more oysters with my razor, I '11 cut you off with a 
shilling." — "Very well, father," retorted Tom, "but 
where will the shilling come from ? " 

Thus into every avenue of life and character Wit 
darts its porcupine quills, — pinching the pompous, abas- 
ing the proud, branding the shameless, knocking out the 
teeth of Pretension. The foibles and crimes of men, 
indeed, afford perpetual occasions for wit. As soon as 
the human being becomes a moral agent, as soon as he 
has put off the vesture of infancy and been fairly depos- 
ited in trowsers, his life becomes a kind of tragi-comical 
caricature of himself. Tetchy, capricious, wayward, 
inconsistent, — his ideas sparks of gunpowder which 
explode at the first touch of fire, — - running the gauntlet 
of experience, and getting cornered at every step, — 
making love to a Fanny Squeers, thinking her an 
Imogen, and finding her a Mrs. Caudle, — buffeting and 
battling his way through countless disappointments and 
ludicrous surprises, — it is well for him if his misfortunes 
of one year can constitute his mirth of the next. One 
thing is certain, that if he cannot laugh as well as rail — 
if he cannot grow occasionally jubilant over his own 
verdancy — if he persists pragmatically in referring his 
failures to the world's injustice instead of his own folly, 
— he will end in moroseness and egotism, in cant that 
snivels and misanthropy that mouths. Even genius and 



112 WIT AND HUMOR. 

philanthropy are incomplete, without they are accompa- 
nied by some sense of the ludicrous ; for an extreme 
sensitiveness to the evil and misery of society becomes a 
maddening torture if not modified by a feeling- of the 
humorous, and urges its subjects into morbid exaggera- 
tions of life's dark side. Thus many who, in our day, 
leap headlong into benevolent reforms, merely caricature 
philanthropy. Blinded by one idea, they miss their 
mark, dash themselves insanely against immovable 
rocks, and break up the whole stream of their life into 
mere sputter and foam. A man of genius, intolerant of 
the world's prose, or incompetent to perceive the humor 
which underlies it, cannot represent life without distor- 
tion and exaggeration. Had Shelley possessed humor, 
his might have been the third name in English poetry. 
The everlasting delight we take in Shakspeare and 
Scott comes from the vivid perception they had of both 
aspects of life, and their felicitous presentment of them, 
as they jog against each other in the world. 

As Wit in its practical executive form usually runs 
into some of the modifications of satire, so Humor, which 
includes Wit, generally blends with sympathetic feeling. 
Humor takes no delight in the mere infliction of pain ; 
it has no connection with the aggressive or destructive 
passions. In the creation and delineation of comic char- 
acter it is most delightedly employed, and here " Jona- 



WIT AND HUMOR. 






113 



than Wild is not too low for it, nor Lord Shaftsbury too 
high ; " it deals with the nicest refinements of the ludi- 
crous, and also with what Sterling calls the " trivial and 
the bombastic, the drivelling, squinting, sprawling clown- 
eries of nature, with her worn out stage-properties and 
rag-fair emblazonments. " The man of humor, seeing, at 
one glance, the majestic and the mean, the serious and 
the laughable ; indeed, interpreting what is little or ridic- 
ulous by light derived from its opposite idea ; delineates 
character as he finds it in life, without any impertinent 
intrusion of his own indignation or approval. He sees 
deeply into human nature ; lays open the hidden struc- 
ture and most complex machinery of the mind, and un- 
derstands not merely the motives which guide actions, 
but the processes by which they are concealed from the 
actors. For instance, life is filled with what is called 
hypocrisy, — with the assignment of false motives to 
actions. This is a constant source of the laughable in 
conduct. Wit, judging simply from the act, treats it as 
a vice, and holds it up to derision or execration ; but 
Humor commonly considers it as a weakness, deluding 
none so much as the actor, and in that self-delusion finds 
food for its mirth. The character of old John Willett, in 
Barnaby Kudge, so delicious as a piece of humor, would 
be but a barren butt in the hands of Wit. Wit cannot 
create character. It might, for instance, cluster innu- 
8 



114 WIT AND HUMOR. 

merable satirical associations around the abstract idea of 
gluttony, but it could not picture to the eye such a per- 
son as Don Quixote's squire. It cannot create even a* 
purely witty character, such as Thersites, Benedict or 
Beatrice. In Congreve's plays, the characters are not so 
much men and women as epigrammatic machines, whose 
wit, incessant as a shower of fiery rain, still throws no 
light into their heads or hearts. Now Humor will have 
nothing to do with abstractions. It dwells snugly in 
concrete personal substances, having no toleration either 
for the unnaturally low or the factitiously sublime. It 
remorselessly brings down Britannia to John Bull, Cale- 
donia to Sawney, Hibernia to Paddy, Columbia to Jona- 
than. It hates all generalities. A benevolent lady, in a 
work written to carry on a benevolent enterprise, com- 
mended the project to the humanity, the enlightened 
liberality, the enlarged Christian feeling, of the British 
nation. The roguish and twinkling eye of Sydney 
Smith lighted on this paragraph, and he cried out to her 
to leave all that, and support her cause with ascertained 
facts. " The English," said he, with inimitable humor, 
" are a calm, reflecting nation ; they will give time and 
money when they are convinced ; but they love dates, 
names and certificates. In the midst of the most heart- 
rending narratives, Bull inquires the day of the month, 
the year of our Lord, the name of the parish, and the 



WIT AND HUMOR. 115 

countersign of three or four respectable householders. 
After these affecting circumstances have been given, he 
can no longer hold out ; but gives way to the kindness 
of his nature, — puffs, blubbers, and subscribes !" 

There is probably no literature equal to the English 
in the number and variety of its humorous characters, as 
we find them in Shakspeare, Jonson, Fletcher, Fielding, 
Goldsmith, Addison, Scott, and Dickens. There is 
nothing so well calculated to make us cheerful and char- 
itable, nothing which sinks so liquidly into the mind, 
and floods it with such a rich sense of mirth and delight, 
as these comic creations. How they flash upon our 
inward world of thought, peopling it with forms and 
faces whose beautiful facetiousness sheds light and 
warmth over our whole being ! How their eyes twinkle 
and wink with the very unction of mirth ! How they 
roll and tumble about in a sea of delicious Fun, unwea- 
ried in rogueries, and drolleries, and gamesome absurdi- 
ties, and wheedling gibes, and loud-ringing extravagant 
laughter, — revelling and rioting in hilarity, — with 
countless jests and waggeries running and raining from 
them in a sun-lit stream of jubilant merriment ! How 
they flood life with mirth ! How they roll up pomposity 
and pretence into great balls of caricature, and set them 
sluggishly in motion before our eyes, to tear the laughter 
from our lungs ! How Sir Toby Belch, and Sir Andrew 



116 WIT AND HUMOR. 

Aguecheek, and Ancient Pistol, and Captain Bobadil, 
and old Tony Weller, tumble into our sympathies! 
What a sneaking kindness we have for Eichard Swivel- 
ler, and how deeply we speculate on the potential exist- 
ence of Mrs. Gamp's Mrs. Harris ! How we stow away, 
in some nook or cranny of our brain, some Master Si- 
lence, or Starveling the tailor, or Autolychus the rogue, 
whom it would not be genteel to exhibit to our Eeason 
or Conscience ! How we take some Dogberry, or Verges, 
or Snug the joiner, tattooed and carbanadoed by the 
world's wit, and lay him on the soft couch of our esteem ! 
How we cuff that imp of mischief, Mr. Bailey, as though 
we loved him ! How Peter Peebles, and Baillie Nicol 
Jar vie, and Dominie Sampson, and old Andrew Fairser- 
vice, push themselves into our imaginations, and imper- 
tinently abide there, whether we will or no ! How 
Beatrice and Benedict shoot wit at us from their eyes, 
as the sun darts beams ! There is Touchstone, " swift 
and sententious," bragging that he has " undone three 
tailors, had four quarrels, and like to have fought one." 
There is Sancho Panza, with his shrewd folly and selfish 
chivalry, — his passion for food an argument against the 
dogma of the soul's residing in the head, — a pestilent fine 
knave and unrighteous good fellow, — tossed about from 
generation to generation, an object of perpetual merri- 
ment. " That man," said King Philip, pointing to one 



WIT AND HUMOR. 117 

of his courtiers, rolling on the floor in convulsions of 
laughter, — " that man must either be mad, or reading 
Don Quixote," 

But what shall we say of Falstaff? — filling up the 
whole sense of mirth, — his fat body " larding the lean 
earth," as he walks along, — coward, bully, thief, glut- 
ton, all fused and molten in good humor, — his talk one 
incessant storm of " fiery and delectable shapes" from his 
forgetive brain ! There, too, is Mercutio, the perfection 
of intellectual spirits, the very soul of gayety, — whose 
wit seems to go on runners, — -the threads of his brain 
light as gossamer and subtle as steel, — his mirthful 
sallies tingling and glancing and crinkling, like heat- 
lightning, on all around him ! How his flashing badi- 
nage plays with Romeo's love-forlornness ! " Romeo is 
dead ! stabbed, — with a white wench's black eye! 
Shot through the ear with a love-song ! The very pin 
of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt shaft ! " 
Look, too, at Thersites : — his lithe jests piercing, 
sharper than Trojan javelins, the brawny Ajax and 
Agamemnon, and his hard "hits" battering their thick 
skulls worse than Trojan battle-axes ! 

If ye like not the sardonic Grecian, then cross from 
Shakspeare to Scott, and shake hands with that bundle 
of amiable weaknesses, Baillie Nicol Jarvie. Who can 
resist the cogent logic by which he defends his free- 



118 WIT AND HtTMOR. 

booter kinsman, Eob Eoy, from the taunts of his brother 
magistrates? "I tauld them," said he, "that I would 
vindicate nae man's faults ; but set apart what Eob had 
done again the law, and the misfortune o' some folk 
losing life by him, and he was an honester man than 
stude on any o' their shanks ! " 

Look ye now, for one moment, at the deep and deli- 
cate humor of Goldsmith. How at his touch the venial 
infirmities and simple vanity of the good Vicar of Wake- 
field live lovingly before the mind's eye ! How we 
sympathize with poor Moses in that deep trade of his 
for the green spectacles ! How all our good wishes for 
aspiring rusticity thrill for the showman, who would 
let his bear dance only to the genteelest tunes ! There, 
too, is Fielding. Who can forget the disputes of Square 
and Thwackem ; the raging, galvanized imbecility of old 
Squire Western ; the good, simple Parson Adams, who 
thought schoolmasters the greatest of men, and himself 
the greatest of schoolmasters ! 

But why proceed in an enumeration of characters 
whose name is Legion — who spring up, at the slightest 
call, like Ehoderick Dhu's men, from every bush and 
brake of memory, and come thronging and crowding into 
the brain ! There they are, nature's own capricious 
offspring — with the unfading rose in their puffed cheeks, 
with the unfailing glee in their twinkling eyes : 



WIT AND HTJMOR. 119 

" Age cannot wither, nor custom stale 
Their infinite variety ! " 

If " time and the hour" would admit, it would not be 
out of place to refer to Wit as an auxiliary power in 
contests of the intellect ; to its influence in detecting 
sophisms which elude serious reasoning, such as the sub- 
stitution, so common among the prejudiced and the igno- 
rant, of false causes for striking effects. In Mirth, too, 
are often expressed thoughts of the utmost seriousness, 
feelings of the greatest depth, Many men are too sensi- 
tive to give voice to their most profound or enthusiastic 
emotions, except through the language of caricature, or 
the grotesque forms of droller}'. Tom Hood is an in- 
stance. "We often meet men whose jests convey truths 
plucked from the bitterest personal experience, and whose 
very laughter tells of the " secret wounds which bleed 
beneath their cloaks." Whenever you find Humor, you 
find Pathos close by its side. 

Every student of English theological literature knows 
that much of its best portions gleams with wit. Five 
of the greatest humorists that ever made the world 
ring with laughter were priests, — Rabelais, Scarron, 
Swift, Sterne, and Sydney Smith. The prose works 
of Milton are radiant with satire of the sharpest kind. 
Sydney Smith, one of the most benevolent, intelligent 
and influential Englishmen of the nineteenth century, 



120 WIT AND HUMOR. 

a man of the most accurate insight and extensive 
information, embodied the large stores of his practical 
wisdom in almost every form of the ludicrous. Many 
of the most important reforms in England are directly 
traceable to him. He really laughed his countrymen out 
of some of their most cherished stupidities of legislation. 
And now let us be just to Mirth. Let us be thankful 
that we have in Wit a power before which the pride of 
wealth and the insolence of office are abased; which 
can transfix bigotry and tyranny with arrows of light- 
ning ; which can strike its object over thousands of miles 
of space, across thousands of years of time ; and which, 
through its sway over an universal weakness of man, is 
an everlasting instrument to make the bad tremble and 
the.* foolish wince. Let us be grateful for the social and 
humanizing influences of Mirth. Amid the sorrow, dis- 
appointment, agony and anguish of the world, — over 
dark thoughts and tempestuous passions, the gloomy ex- 
aggerations of self-will, the enfeebling illusions of melan- 
choly, — Wit and Humor, light and lightning, shed their 
soft radiance, or dart their electric flash. See how life 
is warmed and illumined by Mirth ! See how the beings 
of the mind, with which it has peopled our imaginations, 
wrestle with the ills of existence, — feeling their way 
into the harshest or saddest meditations, with looks that 
defy calamity ; relaxing muscles made rigid with pain ; 



WIT AND HUMOR. 121 

hovering o'er the couch of sickness, with sunshine and 
laughter in their beneficent faces ; softening the austerity 
of thoughts whose awful shadows dim and darken the 
brain, — loosening the gripe of Misery as it tugs at the 
heart-strings ! Let us court the society of these game- 
some, and genial, and sportive, and sparkling beings, 
whom Genius has left to us as a priceless bequest ; push 
them not from the daily walks of the world's life ; let 
them scatter some humanities in the sullen marts of busi- 
ness ; let them glide in through the open doors of the 
heart; let their glee lighten up the feast, and gladden 
the fireside of home : — 

11 That the night may be filled with music, 
And the cares that infest the day 
May fold their tents, like the Arabs, 
And as silently steal away." 



LECTURE IV.* 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

In a lecture on Wit and Humor, which I had the honor 
of delivering before this society last winter, I attempted 
an analysis of those qualities, — exhibited the influence of 
Wit as a political weapon, and alluded to Humor as a 
creator of comic character. This evening, I desire to ask 
your attention to another department of the same exhaust- 
less subject, — The Ludicrous Side of Life; that is, those 
aspects of crime, misery, folly and weakness, under which 
they appear laughable as well as lamentable. The sub- 
ject is so philosophical in its nature, presents so many of 
the more remote and elusive points of character for 
analysis, and demands so rigorous a classification of social 
facts, that the audience must pardon me if the amuse- 
ment suggested by the title of the lecture is not borne 
out by a corresponding pleasantry in its treatment. 

The ludicrous in life arises from the imperfection of 

* Delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, 
October, 1846. 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 123 

human nature, from that perpetual contradiction between 
our acts and aspirations which makes our ideas everlast- 
ing satires on our deeds and institutions. If we consider 
only the elements of human nature, we can easily con- 
ceive them so harmoniously combined as to constitute 
perfection of character ; but the moment we pass from 
thoughts to facts, we are amazed at the monstrous per- 
versions and misdirections of these elements. Instead 
of a reciprocal action of coordinate powers, we find what 
appears to be a mad jumble of conflicting opinions and 
impulses. We see the seemingly self-centred being, who 
goes under the name of Man, whirled continually from 
his beckoning ideals by a thousand seductive external 
impressions ; changing from " half dust, half deity," into 
all dust and no deity ; and running the dark round of 
weakness and wickedness, from the besotted stupidity of 
the idiot, to the grinning malignity of the fiend. We 
turn, heart-sick and brain-sick, to the past, only to find the 
same moral chaos, — a confused mass of folly and crime, 
dignified now with the title of expediency, now with that 
of glory, — Caligulas and Neros, Caesars and Napoleons, 
James Stuarts and Frederick Williams, each experiment- 
ing on the most efficacious way of ruining nations, each 
playing off a gigantic game of theft or murder before an 
admiring or reverential world. Vice on the throne, vir- 
tue on the gibbet, — there you have the two prominent 



124 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

figures in the grand historical picture painted on the 
wide canvass of time. 

Now, unless there were in the human mind certain 
powers, by which all this wickedness and wretchedness 
could be gazed at from a different point of view than that 
of passion or conscience, there can be no doubt that 
thought and observation would drive every good man 
into insanity. We know this from the manner in which 
excitable spirits all around us rave and fret at the world's 
evil, even now. "We may not say how thin is often the 
partition which separates the caucus and reform meeting 
from the strait-jacket and the maniac's cell; and in 
how many hearts, on fire with an indignant hatred of 
oppression and hypocrisy, there burns the impatient 
impulse of the blind giant of old, to pull down the pillars 
of the social edifice, if by so doing they might crush the 
Philistines feasting within its walls. But the human 
mind cannot long live on stilts, and nature therefore has 
provided two powers by which the asperities of sensibility 
may be softened, — Imagination and Mirth : Imagination 
cunningly substituting its own ideals for facts, and 
smoothly cheering the mind with beautiful illusions; 
Mirth looking facts right in the face, detecting their ludi- 
crous side, and turning them into objects of genial glee 
or scornful laughter. By a perception of human faults 
and follies under the conditions of Humor, we lose our 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 125 

indignant disgust, and regain our humanity; and by- 
seeing crime with the eye of Wit, we find that it is as 
essentially mean, little and ridiculous, as it is hateful. 
The serpent, it is true, still retains its form ; but its head 
is no longer raised, its eyes no longer glitter, its fangs no 
longer dart poison, but it crawls fearfully away to its foul 
hiding-place, the trample and spurn of every contemptu- 
ous heel — and then it becomes our turn to hiss ! What, 
indeed, can be more pitiably ridiculous than the spectacle 
of a man, endowed at the best or worst with but a small 
portion of a demon's venom or a demon's power, setting 
himself up against God and the nature of things ! — an 
insignificant insect in the path of the lightning, sagely 
bullying the bolt ! 

Thus the crimes and infirmities of human nature, as 
manifested in the million diversities of character and 
peculiarities of action and position, can be made the sub- 
jects of merriment as well as moralizing. Change the 
point of view, and the things which made us shriek will 
make us laugh. From Lucifer to Jerry Sneak, there is 
not an aspect of evil, imperfection and littleness, which 
can elude the light of Humor or the lightning of Wit. 
It would be impossible, in one or twenty lectures, to show 
the unnumbered varieties of Mirth, from which these 
crimes and infirmities may be viewed. I shall confine 
myself, therefore, to the two extremes of Humor and Wit, 



126 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

the jovial and the bitter ; and I cannot better illustrate 
them than by a consideration of the two great exponents 
of these extremes, Rabelais and Shakspeare's Thersites. 
Between these lie unnumbered varieties of mirth. Ra- 
belais is all fun at human weakness ; Thersites, all gall 
at human depravity. And first, let us look at Rabelais, 
the wisest, shrewdest, coarsest, most fertile, most reckless, 
of all humorists. Both his life and works were steeped 
in fun to the very lips. Fun seemed the condition of his 
being ; his genius, learning, passions, hopes, faith, all in- 
stinctively fashioned themselves into some of the various 
oddities of mirth. Hermes shook hands with Momus at 
his nativity. The period in which he lived, the first half 
of the sixteenth century, was one of amazing licentious- 
ness; and he has portrayed it with a vulgarity as amazing. 
The religion of that age seemed to consist in the worship 
of two deities from the heathen heaven, Mars and Bac- 
chus, and two devils from the Christian pandemonium, 
Moloch and Belial. Its enormities were calculated to pro- 
voke a shudder rather than a smile. Yet to Rabelais, the 
dark intrigues of poisoners and stabbers calling them- 
selves statesmen, and the desolating wars waged by 
sceptred highwaymen calling themselves kings, appeared 
exquisitely ridiculous. All the actors in that infernal 
farce, all who led up the giddy death-dance of the tyrants 
and bacchanals, only drew from him roar upon roar of 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 127 

elephantine laughter. His humor rushes from him like 
an inundation, unfixing the solidest pyramids of human 
pride, whelming everything away in a flood of ridicule. 
All that was externally dignified in the church and state 
of Europe, — kings, queens, nobles, cardinals, — he tum- 
bles about like so many mischievous children, and makes 
them indulge in the most insane freaks of elvish caprice. 
But here we must distinguish between the resistless 
mirth of Eabelais, which is compatible with essential 
humanity, and the monstrous glee of some base and 
detestable tyrants, who have jested with human blood, 
and found a demoniacal delight in laughing over deeds 
which have consigned them to the execration of posterity. 
Such was Nero, who saw in the burning of Eome, set on 
fire by himself, only an occasion for exercising his musi- 
cal talents. Such was Barrere, that miracle of cruelty 
and baseness, who, amid all the horrors of the French 
Revolution, never descended into the weakness of pity, 
but performed the worst atrocities of oppression and mur- 
der with a fiendish glee. Thus, to please an infamous 
companion, he obtained the passage of a law denouncing 
the wearing of a certain head-dress as a capital crime 
against the state. He never told the story, says his 
biographer, without going into convulsions of laughter, 
which made his hearers hope he would choke; and 
Macaulay adds, that there must have been something 



128 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

peculiarly tickling and exhilarating, to a mind like his, 
" in this grotesque combination of the frivolous and the 
horrible, — false hair and curling-irons with spouting 
arteries and reeking hatchets." Such laughter as this 
might indeed make 

" Hell's burning rafters 
Unwillingly reecho laughters." 

But such was not the mirth of Rabelais. He could not 
have laughed with Nero and Barrere ; he could not have 
helped laughing at them. 

From the stories told of Rabelais, he must have been 
in life the same strange, wise, sharp, and mirthful imp, 
which he appears in his writings. He seems even to 
have looked death in the face with a grin on his own. 
As his friends were weeping round his bed, he exclaimed, 
— " Ah ! if I were to die ten times over. I should never 
make you cry half so much as I have made you laugh." 
Being pressed by some ravenous relations, who thought 
him rich, to sign a will leaving them large legacies, he 
at last complied, and on being asked where the money 
could be found, he answered, " As for that, you must do 
like the spaniel, look about and search." As he was 
dying, a page entered from the Cardinal du Bellay, to 
inquire after his health. The old humorist muttered in 
reply, — " Tell my lord in what circumstance you found 
me; I am just going to leap into the dark. He is up in 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 129 

the cock-loft ; bid him stay where he is. As for thee, 
thou 'It always be a fool. Let down the curtain ; the 
farce is done." Immediately after his death, his relations 
seized upon a sealed paper, purporting to be his last will 
and testament, which, on being opened, was found to 
contain three pithy articles : " I owe much ; I have noth- 
ing : I leave the rest to the poor." 

Many eminent and some virtuous men have left the 
world with jests on their lips. Augustus Caesar appealed 
to the friends round his dying bed, if he had not very 
well acted the farce of life. Sir Thomas More joked on 
the scaffold. The wit of Lord Dorset, in his last hours, 
surprised even Congreve, the wittiest of English comic 
dramatists. But Rabelais, in life and death, was the 
most consistent of all the tribe of Democritus. His 
deepest and subtlest meditations, his most earnest loves 
and hatreds, were sportively expressed; and when he came 
to " leap into the dark," it was a jest that lit the way. 
It would be easy to moralize out the rest of the hour on 
such a mirthful monstrosity as this ; but that is not my 
business here. There the old wag stands in literary history 
— a monument of mirth, with his large, unctuous brain, 
his rosy and roguish face, his fat free-and-easiness ; a mad 
jest lurking in every line of his lawless lips, a wild glee 
leaping in every glance of his laughing eyes ! There is 

but one Rabelais. 

9 



130 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

Now Thersites, in Shakspeare's Troilus and Cres- 
sida, is a man of an entirely different make. He repre- 
sents the class of wits who hate and deride crime from 
no love of virtue, and belittle greatness merely to glut 
their waspish spleen. But he is perfect in his way. He 
talks a whole armory of swords and stilettos. His words 
hurtle through the air like fire-tipped arrows. They 
seem almost to hit the reader, — so keen are they, and 
sent with such unerring aim. He is the thorniest of all 
wits. His bitter brilliancy bites into the very core of 
things. The great-limbed Homeric heroes. Achilles, 
Ajax, Agamemnon, look small enough in his stabbing 
sentences. His railing is more executive than their 
smiting arms ; and he tosses them up and down, riddling 
them with his satire, almost impaling them with his 
edged scorn. " Hector," he says to Ajax and Achilles, 
" Hector will have a great catch if he knocks out either 
of your brains ; 'a were as good crack a fusty nut with 
no kernel." And then how his sharp malice exults over 
these examples of " valiant ignorance," these " sodden- 
witted lords, that wear their tongues in their arms ! " 
His description of Ajax ruminating is perfect. " He 
bites his lip with a politic regard, as who should say — 
There were wit in this head an 't would out : and so there 
is ; but it lies as coldly in him as fire in a flint, which 
will not show without knocking." Again, he calls him 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 131 

the "idol of idiot worshippers,'' "a full dish of fool," "a 
mongrel cur;" and the richly dressed Patroclus he 
addresses as — "Thou idle immaterial skein of sleive 
silk, thou green sarcenet flap for a sore eye, thou tassel 
of a prodigal's purse, thou ! Ah ! how the poor world is 
pestered with such water-flies, diminutives of nature ! " 
So fares it with " that same dog-fox, Ulysses, and that 
stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese, Nestor." Every one 
who wishes to know the height and depth of railing 
should give his days and nights to Thersites. He accu- 
mulates round the objects of his hatred all images of 
scorn and contumely ; and he hates everybody, not 
excluding himself. Everything in him has turned to 
spleen ; everything that comes from him is dipped in his 
gall. His criticism of the persons and events of the 
Trojan war, as they pass before his view, takes the heroic 
element clean out of them. It is wonderfully edifying to 
hear him discourse of Paris and Helen. With one stroke 
of his tongue heroes descend into beef-witted bullies, 
goddesses dwindle down into silly girls. He buzzes over 
the Grecian camp like a hornet, and seizes every favora- 
ble moment to dart down and sting. No matter how 
much he is beaten by the brawny fist of his master Ajax 
— his tongue revenges every blow in a hail-storm of 
scurrilous words. You can hear them patter on the 
helmets of the Greeks, like a shower of Trojan stones. 



132 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

Thersites is an everlasting proof of the resistless power 
of the'tongue. He lashes both armies with a whip of 
words, and leaves his jests sticking in their flesh like so 
many thorns and thistles. The fine audacity of Shaks- 
peare's world-wide genius could hardly have been more 
splendidly displayed than thus in placing the bitterest of 
human satirists side by side with the most poetical of 
human heroes. 

In looking at the laughable side of life, it might be 
dangerous to depict it a la Rabelais or a la Thersites. 
But between these extremes are numberless varieties ; 
and it is from some half-way station, perhaps, that we 
may obtain the best view. We have already seen that 
it is from the inharmoniousness and consequent perver- 
sion of the human mind that the ludicrous in human 
life has its source, and in proportion to the vividness 
with which we perceive the original laws and principles 
thus perverted, will be the clearness of our insight into 
the ridiculousness of the perversions. Now everything 
morbid, diseased and one-sided, everything out of its due 
relations, all excess in the development of any one faculty 
or opinion, go to make up the vast mass of life's bombast 
and bathos. The slightest glance at society reveals the 
most contemptible shams strutting under borrowed names. 
Nothing in itself good but is transformed by the cunning 
alchemy of selfishness into some portentous evil or pitiful 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 133 

deception, transparent to the eye of Mirth, but foil of 
sacredness to the eye of Wonder. There is a great 
difference, says Coleridge, " between an egg and an egg- 
shell; but at a distance they look remarkably alike." 
Now, to question these deceptions, to pierce these bubbles 
with shafts that disclose their emptiness, generally raises 
the most discordant cackling among the world's geese. 
Miss Pigeon is so charmed with the attentions of Captain 
■ Rook, that she grows amazingly indignant at the voice 
which forbids the banns. Appearances have so long been 
confounded with realities, that an attack on the one is too 
commonly taken as evidence of enmity to the other; and, 
like the charmed bullet of the hunter, strikes the shepherd, 
though directed at the wolf. Everybody knows that 
fanaticism is religion caricatured ; bears, indeed, about the 
same relation to it that a monkey bears to a man ; yet, 
with many, contempt of fanaticism is received as a sure 
sign of hostility to religion. Thus things go moaning 
up and down for their lost words, and words are perpetu- 
ally engaged in dodging things ; and it becomes exceed- 
ingly dangerous for a prudent man to discriminate 
between a truth and its distortion — between prudence 
and avarice, acuteness and cunning, sentiment and sen- 
timentality, sanctity and sanctimoniousness, justice and 
" Revised Statutes," the dignity of human nature and 



134 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

the Hon. Mr. ; yet it is just in this discrimina- 
tion that the ludicrous side of life is revealed. 

And now let us glance at this heaving sea of human 
life, with its pride, its vanity, its hypocrisy, its selfishness, 
its match-making, its scandal-mongering, its substitution 
of the plausible for the true, the respectable for the good, 
and pick out a few of its leading falsehoods for comment. 
The first quality that strikes us here is human pride, with 
its long trains of hypocrisy and selfishness. " This comes 
of walking on the earth," said the Spanish hidalgo of 
Quevedo, when he fell upon the ground. Alas ! that 
Tom Moore's bitter pleasantry on the peacock politician 
should apply to so large a portion of mankind : — 

" The best speculation that the market holds forth, 
To any enlightened lover of pelf, 

Is to buy up at the price he is worth, 

And sell him at that he puts on himself." 

Now this pride, this self-exaggeration, the parent of all 
spiritual sins, tracing its long lineage up to Lucifer him- 
self, is as ridiculous as it is malignant. From our well- 
bred horror of the Satanic, the devil to us is a sublimely 
wicked object ; but I can conceive of Rabelais as rushing 
into convulsions of laughter at the folly of Satan, — at 
the mere idea of imperfect evil waging its weak war 
against omnipotent Good ! 

What a lesson, indeed, is all history, and all life, 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 135 

to the folly and fruitlessness of pride ! The Egyp- 
tian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in 
massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. 
In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack 
medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel ! " The 
Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or Time hath 
spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become 
merchandise. Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is 
sold for balsams." Pride and vanity have raised those 
iron walls of separation between men, that division of 
humanity into classes and ranks, which neither benevo- 
lence nor religion can leap. The artificial distinctions 
of society, the parents of numberless fooleries of bigotry 
and prejudice, will probably afford matter of everlasting 
moralizing to the preacher, and everlasting merriment to 
the wit. " I considered him," said a witness in Thur- 
tell's trial, " I considered him a very respectable man." 
" What do you mean by respectable ? " — " Why, he kept 
a gig ! " Rank, birth, wealth, saith the worldling, thou 
shalt have no other gods but these. Genius and virtue 
are good only when they are genteel. The brother of 
Beethoven was of this creed. He signed his name, to 

distinguish himself, from his landless brother, " 

Von Beethoven, Land-owner." The immortal composer 
retorted by signing his, " Ludwig Von Beethoven, Brain- 
owner." We often hear in society the magical death- 



136 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

warrant pronounced — " He does not belong to our class 
— she does not belong to our set" — as if those words 
cast out the condemned into another species, — as if the 
class or set included all in the world we are bound to 
esteem, all whose rights we are bound to respect. The 
huntsman, in Joseph Andrews, calls off his hounds from 
chasing the poor parson, because they would be injured 
by following vermin ! The ludicrous bigotries, the stu- 
pendous stupidities, which this isolation from the race 
engenders, are often perfectly amazing instances of human 
folly. " When a country squire," says Sydney Smith, 
" hears of an ape, his first impulse is to give it nuts and 
apples; when he hears of a dissenter, his immediate 
impulse is to commit it to the county jail, to shave its 
head, to alter its customary food, and to have it privately 
whipped." In Christian England the feeling of caste is 
nearly as potent as in heathen India. The nobleman 
hardly realizes that he belongs to the same original spe- 
cies, and has part in the same original sin, as the miner 
and cotton-spinner; — though nothing would seem to be 
more evident than that 

11 From yon blue heaven above us bent, 
The gardener Adam and his wife 
Smile at the claims of long descent." 

But we need not cross the Atlantic to discover these 
division lines between the vulgar little and the vulgar 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 137 

great. The weakness of the American people is the 
absurd importance they attach to gentility. To gain 
this, they sacrifice health, strength, comfort, and often 
honor. As a man here, however, must have power as 
well as caste, his life oscillates between two ambitions ; 
the ambition to be popular, and the ambition to be gen- 
teel. He accordingly puts his " universal brotherhood " 
into sermons, his patriotism into Fourth of July orations, 
and his life and soul into " our set." It is curious to see 
the agency of this gentility in formalizing even love and 
hatred. " What will Mrs. Grundy say ? " — this pertinent 
interrogation has sorcery enough to robe malice in smiles, 
and freeze affection into haughtiness. As there can be no 
happiness in marriage without station and style, the old 
worship of Cupid, the god, is transferred to cupidity, the 
demon ; the test question, not what a person is, but what 
a person has ; and the motive, not so much love as an 
establishment. This has become so common that it is no 
longer called sin, but prudence. The fact is so glaring 
that it has even found its way into the weak heads of 
sentimental novelists. The last result of all this foolery 
is that kind of intellectual death going under the name 
of fashionable life; the declaration that man is not a 
mysterious compound of body and soul, but of coat and 
pantaloons ; and the final triumph of dandy nature over 
human nature. " Nature," says the coxcomb in Colman's 



138 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

comedy, to the blooming country girl, " Nature is very 
clever, for she made you ; but nature never could have 
made me ! " 

The two pillars which support this edifice of human 
pride are impudence and hypocrisy, or shameless preten- 
sion and canting pretension. " Words," said a cunning 
old politician, a few days before his withdrawal from the 
palace to the tomb, " words were given to conceal, not to 
express, thought." Of how large a portion of mankind 
may it be said, that they do not so much live as pretend ? 
Eaise the cry of any reform, and crowds of sharpers and 
dunces rush to pick pockets and talk nonsense under its 
broad banners, and the satirist stands by to declare, with 
South, how much of this liberty of conscience means 
liberty from conscience, or, with Colton, how much of this 
freedom of thought means freedom from thought. Con- 
servatism is a very good thing ; but how many conserva- 
tives announce principles which might have shocked 
Dick Turpin, or nonsensicalities flat enough to have 
raised contempt in Jerry Sneak ! " A conservative," says 
Douglas Jerrold, " is a man who will not look at the new 
moon, out of respect for that ' ancient institution,' the old 
one." Kadicalism or reform is another very good thing ; 
but, quaintly says old Doctor Fuller, " many hope that 
the tree will be felled, who hope to gather chips by the 
fall." When Johnson asserted patriotism to be the last 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 139 

refuge of the scoundrel, he said something not more than 
half true. Would we could aver that he said something 
more than half wrong. Philanthropy is another very- 
good thing, perhaps the best of all good things ; but much 
of it which we see is of a cheap kind ; a compounding of 
" sms we are inclined to," by condemning those " we 
have no mind to ;" an elegant recreation of conscience, 
calling for no self-sacrifice, and admitting the union of 
noble sentiments with ignoble acts. The English mer- 
chant professes to be horror-struck at the atrocities of 
southern slavery ; the slaveholder curses England for her 
starvation policy to labor; the Yankee is liberal of 
rebukes to both. Now this inexpensive moral indignation 
may produce good results ; but shall we throw up our 
caps in admiration of the philanthropy of either ? No ! 
for on the broad and beautiful brow of true philanthropy 
is written self-denial, seZ/-sacrifice. It says, the system 
which enriches me harms another, and therefore I repu- 
diate it, therefore I will do all in my power to put it 
down. 

This conscious hypocrisy it is very easy to understand; 
but there is, in a large number of minds, an unconscious 
hypocrisy, which presents an almost insoluble problem to 
the investigator. In some cases it is self-deceit, resulting 
from weakness or ignorance. In others, it indicates the 
passage of the hypocrite from being false into falsehood 



140 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

itself; the quack believing in his own impostures, — the 
hypocrisy, once on the surface, eating into the very soul 
of the man, and lying him at last into an organic lie. 
These two aspects of character can be perceived, but not 
analyzed. They baffle the metaphysician, only to shine 
more resplendently on the page of the humorist. What 
a Leibnitz or Butler could but imperfectly convey, looks 
out upon us in living forms from the picture-gallery of 
Cervantes and Shakspeare, of Addison and Steele, of 
Goldsmith and Dickens. Without recurring to these, 
instances can be readily adduced from every-day life. 
Benevolence and malignity often coexist in retailers of 
scandal ; persons, who can be fitly described only in the 
verbal paradoxes launched by Timon at his " smiling, 
smooth, detested" parasites, — "courteous destroyers, 
affable wolves, meek bears." Tears are copiously show- 
ered over frailties the discoverer takes a malicious delight 
in circulating ; and thus, all granite on one side of the 
heart, and all milk on the other, the unsexed scandal- 
monger hies from house to house, pouring balm from its 
weeping eyes on the wounds it inflicts with its Stabbing 
tongue. Again, — you all know, that, a short time 
since, when a fear was expressed that the Bible would be 
banished from the public schools, how much horror and 
indignation thereat emitted itself in the lustiest profane 
swearing. But perhaps the finest instance of this uncon- 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 141 

scious hypocrisy is the fact related of the simple southern 
clergyman. He owned half of a negro slave ; and in his 
prayers, therefore, he prayed that the Lord would preserve 
his house, his land, his family, and his half of Pomp. 

It would be impossible to note a thousandth part of the 
hypocrisies, conscious or unconscious, woven into the 
very texture of every-day life, and having their source in 
the desire of men to appear better than they are. Popu- 
lar as are the realities of avarice, malice, falsehood and 
chicane, nothing is more unpopular than their appear- 
ances. License, therefore, must talk the language of 
freedom ; knavery must stalk on the stilts of philan- 
thropy; public plunder and national degradation must 
wear the guise of glory and patriotism. Some have 
almost reached the perfection of South's ideal hypocrite, 
" who never opens his mouth in earnest, but when he 
eats or breathes. " Everywhere, cant ; nowhere, a plain 
avowal of folly or selfishness. Oliver Cromwell cannot 
butcher a couple of poor Irish garrisons, without doing it 

for the glory of God ; the Hon. Mr. cannot argue 

in favor of perpetual slavery, without doing it for the 
good of the slave. O ! never talk of rewarding virtue, 
for virtue never can be paid in the world's sugar-plums ; 
but if life cannot be carried on without roguery, would it 
not be well to place a bounty on courageous, uncanting 
rascality, and, passing by a heap of tongue-virtuous 



142 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

hypocrites, select that man for office who dares to 
acknowledge himself a rogue ! 

Among the countless deceptions passed off on our 
sham-ridden race, let me direct your attention to the 
deception of dignity, as it is one which includes many 
others. Among those terms which have long ceased to 
have any vital meaning, the word dignity deserves a dis- 
graceful prominence. No word has fallen so readily as 
this into the designs of cant, imposture and pretence ; 
none has played so well the part of verbal scarecrow, to 
frighten children of all ages and both sexes. It is at 
once the thinnest and most effective of all the coverings 
under which duncedom sneaks and skulks. Most of the 
men of dignity, who awe or bore their more genial 
brethren, are simply men possessing the art of passing 
off their insensibility for wisdom, their dulness for depth ; 
and of concealing imbecility of intellect under haughti- 
ness of manner. Their success in this small game is one 
of the stereotyped satires on mankind. Once strip from 
these pretenders their stolen garments, once disconnect 
their show of dignity from their real meanness, and they 
would stand shivering and defenceless, objects of the tears 
of pity, or targets for the arrows of scorn. But it is the 
misfortune of this world's affairs, that offices, fitly occu- 
pied only by talent and genius, which despise pretence, 
should be filled by respectable stupidity and dignified 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 143 

emptiness, to whom pretence is the very soul of life. 
Manner triumphs over matter ; and throughout society, 
politics, letters and science, we are doomed to meet a 
swarm of dunces and windbags, disguised as gentlemen, 
statesmen and scholars. Coleridge once saw, at a dinner 
table, a dignified man with a face wise as the moon's. 
The awful charm of his manner was not broken until 
the muffins appeared, and then the imp of gluttony forced 
from him the exclamation, — " Them 's the jockeys for 
me ! " A good number of such dignitarians remain 
undiscovered. 

It is curious to note how these pompous gentlemen 
rule in society and government. How often do history 
and the newspapers exhibit to us the spectacle of a 
heavy-headed stupiditarian in official station, veiling the 
sheerest incompetency in a mysterious sublimity of car- 
riage, solemnly trifling away the interests of the state, 
the dupe of his own obstinate ignorance, and engaged, 
year after year, in ruining a people after the most digni- 
fied fashion ! You. have all seen that inscrutable dispen- 
sation known by the name of the dignified gentleman : 
an embodied tediousness, which society is apt not only 
to tolerate but worship ; a person who announces the 
stale commonplaces of conversation with the awful pre- 
cision of one bringing down to the valleys of thought 
bright truths plucked on its summits ; who is so pro- 



144 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

foundly deep and painfully solid on the weather, the last 
novel, or some other nothing of the day ; who is inex- 
pressibly shocked if your eternal gratitude does not repay 
him for the trite information he consumed your hour in 
imparting ; and who, if you insinuate that his calm, con- 
tented, imperturbable stupidity is preying upon your 
patience, instantly stands upon his dignity, and puts on a 
face. Yet this man, with just enough knowledge " to 
raise himself from the insignificance of a dunce to the 
dignity of a bore," is still in high favor even with those 
whose animation he checks and chills, — why ? Because 
he has, all say, so much of the dignity of a gentleman ! 
The poor, bright, good-natured man, who has done all in 
his power to be agreeable, joins in the cry of praise, and 
feelingly regrets that nature has not adorned him, too, 
with dulness as a robe, so that he likewise might freeze 
the volatile into respect, and be held up as a model spoon 
for all dunces to imitate. This dignity, which so many 
view with reverential despair, must have twinned, " two 
at a birth," with that ursine vanity mentioned by Cole- 
ridge, " which keeps itself alive by sucking the paws of 
its own self-importance." The Duke of Somerset was 
one of these dignified gentlemen. His second wife was 
the most beautiful woman in England. She once sud- 
denly threw her arms round his neck, and gave him a 
kiss which might have gladdened the heart of an empe- 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 145 

ror. The duke, lifting his heavy head awfully up, and 
giving his shoulders an aristocratic square, slowly said, 
" Madam, my first wife was a Howard, and she never 
would have taken such a liberty." 

This absurd importance attached to dignity is a fertile 
source of bombast in life. It not only exalts the bad or 
brainless into high position, but it is apt to convert emi- 
nent men into embodied hyperboles ; for, to fulfil the 
popular requisitions of greatness, you will sometimes see 
statesmen descend into this poor deception, and, though 
giants in action or speculation, condescend to become 
charlatans in manner. Lord Chatham and Napoleon 
were as much actors as Garrick or Talma. Now, an 
imposing air should always be taken as evidence of 
imposition. Dignity is often a veil between us and the 
real truth of things. Wit pierces this veil with its glit- 
tering shafts, and lets in the " insolent light." Humor 
carelessly lifts the curtain, swaggers jauntily into the 
place itself, salutes the amazed wire-pullers with a know- 
ing nod, and ends with slapping Dignity on the back, 
with a " How are ye, my old boy ?" 

In truth, the factitious elevation we give to some per- 
sons comes from identifying the actual and the ideal, 
— the imagination cunningly suppressing minor faults, 
exaggerating certain qualities into colossal size, and call- 
ing those qualities by the name of men. The characters 
10 



146 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

of distinguished personages are generally drawn in this 
way. It is the vice of most biographies, and gives a 
wooden and unnatural aspect to most characters in his- 
tory. The difference between the truth and deception, in 
this regard, is the difference between a character drawn 
by Racine and a character drawn by Shakspeare or 
Scott. This factitious dignity cannot stand a moment 
the test of ridicule. One of the most externally awful 
and imposing persons in the world is the Speaker of the 
House of Commons. There once happened to be a dead 
silence in the house, when its members were all present. 
This was broken by a startling hiccough in the gal- 
lery, and the voice of a drunken reporter putting the 
stunning interrogative, " Mr. Speaker, will you favor us 
with a song ? " 

The dainty portions of literature are ever liable to 
overturn from the shocks of prose. Not only has life its 
ludicrous side, but its serious side has its ludicrous 
point. Poetry itself is often an exquisitely ironical 
comment upon actual life, but few seem to take the joke. 
The original of Goethe's Werther, whose "sorrows'' 
have become immortal, was a dull fellow, with nothing 
in his face indicative of sentiment or intelligence. A 
person who visited him remarked, that nobody would 
know he had any brains, if the poet had not informed us 
he had blown them out. Halleck's notion of Wyoming, 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 147 

drawn from observation, is different from Campbell's, 
drawn from fancy. The Gertrude of Halleck is found 
"hoeing corn." Pastoral life can hardly be found in 
pastures. All heroism, even, which depends on external 
costume or form, is ever in danger of being killed by 
little actualities. "The Iliad," says Sydney Smith, 
" would never have come down to these times if Aga- 
memnon had given Achilles a box on the ear. We should 
have trembled for the iEneid if some Trojan nobleman 
had kicked the pious iEneas in the Fourth Book. iEneas 
may have deserved it ; but he could not have founded 
the Roman empire after so distressing an accident." 
And we have all seen how an American general, singed 
and scarred with the fire of desperately contested battles, 
came near being extinguished at last, from a slightly 
increased alacrity in the disposition of his soup. 

From this confounding of substance with form, this 
universal tendency to individual exaggeration and bom- 
bast, this stilted way of carrying on life, it has become 
customary to identify mirth with frivolity. Without 
insisting upon the depth and wisdom of the great Wits 
and Humorists of the world, it is evident that the best 
arguments are often condensed into epigrams, and that 
good jokes are often comprehensive axioms. 

The narrowness of utilitarianism was never made so 
evident as in the remark, that " we do not estimate the 



148 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

value of the sun by the amount it saves us in gas." 
Carlyle's whole theory of government is contained in a 
quibble, — that nations are not governed by the able 
man, but the man able to get appointed. Superstitions, 
exploded by knowledge, often exist as puns. Thus some 
of the ancients, who believed the soul to be made of fire, 
considered death by drowning to be remediless — w T ater 
putting the soul out. An epigram often flashes light 
into regions where reason shines but dimly. Holmes 
disposed of the bigot at once, when he compared his 
mind to the pupil of the eye, — " the more light you let 
into it, the more it contracts." Nothing better exhibits 
the horrors of capricious despotism than the humorous 
statement of the King of Candia's habits : " If his tea is 
not sweet enough, he impales his footman ; and smites 
off the head of half a dozen noblemen, if he has a pain 
in his own." In this connection, also, it is not inappro- 
priate to refer to the importance of a vivid perception of 
the ludicrous as a weapon of self-defence. That habit 
of instantaneous analysis which we call readiness has 
saved thousands from contempt or mortification. The 
dexterous leap of thought, by which the mind escapes 
from a seemingly hopeless dilemma, is worth all the 
vestments of dignity which the world holds. It was 
this readiness in repartee which continually saved Vol- 
taire from social overturn. He once praised another 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 149 

writer very heartily to a third person. "It is very 
strange," was the reply, " that you speak so well of him, 
for he says that you are a charlatan." — "0!" replied 
Voltaire, " I think it very likely that both of us may be 
mistaken." Again, you must all have heard the anecdote 
of the young gentleman who was discoursing very dog- 
matically about the appropriate sphere of woman, ''And 
pray, sir," screamed out an old lady, " what is the appro- 
priate sphere of woman?" — t; A celestial sphere, mad- 
am ! " Robert Hall did not lose his power of retort even 
in madness. A hypocritical condoler with his misfor- 
tunes once visited him in the mad-house, and said, in a 
whining tone, "What brought you here, Mr, Hall?" 
Hall significantly touched his brow with his finger, 
and replied, ,; AYhat ? ll never bring you, sir — too much 
brain ! " A rapid change from enthusiasm to nonchalance 
is often necessary in society. Thus a person once elo- 
quently eulogizing the angelic qualities of Joan of Arc, 
was suddenly met by the petulant question, — what was 
Joan of Arc made of? ,; She was Maid of Orleans." 
A Yankee is never upset by the astonishing. He walks 
among the Alps with his hands in his pockets, and the 
smoke of his cigar is seen among the mists of Niagara, 
One of this class sauntered into the office of the light- 
ning telegraph, and asked how long it would take to 
transmit a message to Washington, u Ten minutes," 



150 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 



was the reply. " I can't wait," was his rejoinder. Sher- 
idan never was without a reason, never failed to extricate 
himself in any emergency by his wit. At a country 
house, where he was once on a visit, an elderly maiden 
lady desired to be his companion in a walk. He excused 
himself at first on the ground of the badness of the 
weather. She soon afterwards, however, intercepted 
him in an attempt to escape without her. " Well," she 
said, "it has cleared up, I see." — "Why yes," he an- 
swered, " it has cleared up enough for one, but not enough 
for two." It was this readiness which made John Ran- 
dolph so terrible in retort. He was the Thersites of 
Congress, — a tongue-stabber. No hyperbole of con- 
tempt or scorn could be launched against him, but he 
could overtop it with something more scornful and con- 
temptuous. Opposition only maddened him into more 
brilliant bitterness. " Is n't it a shame, Mr. President," 
said he one day in the senate, " that the noble bull-dogs 
of the administration should be wasting their precious 
time in worrying the rats of the opposition." Immedi- 
ately the senate was in an uproar, and he was clamor- 
ously called to order. The presiding officer, however, 
sustained him ; and, pointing his long, skinny finger at 
his opponents, Randolph screamed out, "Rats, did I 
say ? — mice, mice ! " 

The ludicrous side of life, like the serious side, has its 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 151 

literature, and it is a literature of untold wealth. Mirth 
is a Proteus, changing its shape and manner with the 
thousand diversities of individual character, from the 
most superficial gayety to the deepest, most earnest 
humor. Thus the wit of the airy, feather-brained Far- 
quhar glances and gleams like heat lightning ; that of 
Milton blasts and burns like the bolt. Let us glance 
carelessly over this wide field of comic writers, who have 
drawn new forms of mirthful being from life's ludicrous 
side, and note, here and there, a wit or humorist. There 
is the humor of Goethe, like his own summer morning, 
mirthfully clear ; and there is the tough and knotty 
humor of old Ben Jonson, at times ground down at the 
edge to a sharp cutting scorn, and occasionally hissing 
out stinging words, which seem, like his own Mercury's, 
" steeped in the very brine of conceit, and sparkle like 
salt in fire." There is the incessant brilliancy of Sheri- 
dan, — 

" Whose humor, as gay as the fire-fly's light, 

Played round every subject, and shone as it played ; 
Whose wit, in the combat as gentle as bright, 
Ne'er carried a heart-stain away on its blade." 

There is the uncouth mirth, that winds, stutters, wrig- 
gles and screams, dark, scornful and savage, among the 
dislocated joints of Carlyle's spavined sentences. There 
is the lithe, springy sarcasm, the hilarious badinage, the 



152 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

brilliant careless disdain, which sparkle and scorch along 
the glistening page of Holmes. There is the sleepy smile 
that sometimes lies so benignly on the sweet and serious 
diction of old Izaak Walton. There is the mirth of 
Dickens, twinkling now in some ironical insinuation, — 
and anon winking at you with pleasant maliciousness, its 
distended cheeks fat with suppressed glee, — and then, 
again, coming out in broad gushes of humor, overflowing 
all banks and bounds of conventional decorum. There 
is Sydney Smith, — sly, sleek, swift, subtle, — a mo- 
ment's motion, and the human mouse is in his paw ! 
Mark, in contrast with him, the beautiful heedlessness 
with which the Ariel-like spirit of Gay pours itself out 
in benevolent mockeries of human folly. There, in a 
corner, look at that petulant little man, his features 
w r orking with thought and pain, his lips wrinkled with a 
sardonic smile ; and, see ! the immortal personality has 
received its last point and polish in that toiling brain, 
and, in a straight, luminous line, with a twang like 
Scorn's own arrow, hisses through the air the unerring 
shaft of Pope, — to 

11 Dash the proud gamester from his gilded car," 

And, 

" Bare the base heart that lurks beneath a star." 
There, a little above Pope, see Dryden, keenly dissecting 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 153 

the inconsistencies of Buckingham's volatile mind, or 

leisurely crushing out the insect life of Shad well, — 

11 Owned, without dispute, 
Throughout the realms of Nonsense absolute." 

There, moving gracefully through that carpeted parlor, 
mark that dapper, diminutive Irish gentleman. The 
moment you look at him, your eyes are dazzled with the 
whizzing rockets and hissing wheels, streaking the air 
with a million sparks, from the pyrotechnic brain of 
Anacreon Moore. Again, cast your eyes from that blind- 
ing glare and glitter, to the soft and beautiful brilliancy, 
the winning grace, the bland banter, the gliding wit, the 
diffusive humor, which make you in love with all man- 
kind in the charming pages of Washington Irving. And 
now, for another change, — glance at the jerks and jets 
of satire, the mirthful audacities, the fretting and teasing 
mockeries, of that fat, sharp imp, half Mephistopheles, 
half Falstaff, that cross between Beelzebub and Babelais, 
known, in all lands, as the matchless Mr. Punch. No 
English statesman, however great his power, no English 
nobleman, however high his rank, but knows that every 
week he may be pointed at by the scoffing finger of that 
omnipotent buffoon, and consigned to the ridicule of the 
world. The pride of intellect, the pride of wealth, the 
power to oppress — nothing can save the dunce or crim- 
inal from being pounced upon by Punch, and held up to 



154 THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE. 

a derision or execration, which shall ring from London to 
St. Petersburg, from the Ganges to the Oregon. From 
the vitriol pleasantries of this arch-fiend of Momus, let 
us turn to the benevolent mirth of Addison and Steele, 
whose glory it was to redeem polite literature from moral 
depravity, by showing that wit could chime merrily in 
with the voice of virtue, and who smoothly laughed away 
many a vice of the national character, by that humor 
which tenderly touches the sensitive point with an evan- 
escent grace and genial glee. And here let us not forget 
Goldsmith, whose delicious mirth is of that rare quality 
which lies too deep for laughter, — which melts softly 
into the mind, suffusing it with inexpressible delight, and 
sending the soul dancing joyously into the eyes, to utter 
its merriment in liquid glances, passing all the expression 
of tone. And here, though we cannot do him justice, 
let us remember the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
deserving a place second to none in that band of humor- 
ists whose beautiful depth of cheerful feeling is the very 
poetry of mirth. In ease, grace, delicate sharpness of 
satire, — in a felicity of touch which often surpasses the 
felicity of Addison, in a subtlety of insight which often 
reaches further than the subtlety of Steele, — the humor 
of Hawthorne presents traits so fine as to be almost too 
excellent for popularity, as, to every one who has at- 
tempted their criticism, they are too refined for state- 



THE LUDICROUS SIDE OF LIFE 155 

ment. The brilliant atoms flit, hover, and glance before 
our minds, but the remote sources of their ethereal light 
lie beyond our analysis, — 

" And no speed of ours avails 
To hunt upon their shining trails." 

And now let us breathe a benison to these, our mirthful 
benefactors, these fine revellers among human weak- 
nesses, these stern, keen satirists of human depravity. 
Wherever Humor smiles away the fretting thoughts of 
care, or supplies that antidote which cleanses 

" The stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff 
Which weighs upon the heart," — 

wherever Wit riddles folly, abases pride, or stings iniqui- 
ty, — there glides the cheerful spirit, or glitters the flash- 
ing thought, of these bright enemies of stupidity and 
gloom. Thanks to them, hearty thanks, for teaching us 
that the ludicrous side of life is its wicked side no less 
than its foolish ; that, in a lying world, there is still no 
mercy for falsehood ; that Guilt, however high it may 
lift its brazen front, is never beyond the lightnings of 
Scorn ; and that the lesson they teach agrees with the 
lesson taught by all experience, — that life in harmony 
with reason is the only life safe from laughter, that life 
in harmony with virtue is the only life safe from con- 
tempt. 



LECTURE V.* 



GENIUS. 

There is one law inwoven into the constitution of 
things, which declares that force of mind and character 
must rule the world. This truth glares out upon us 
from daily life, from history, from science, art, letters, 
from all the agencies which influence conduct and 
opinion. The whole existing order of things is one 
vast monument to the supremacy of mind. The exte- 
rior appearance of human life is but the material em- 
bodiment, the substantial expression, of thought, — the 
hieroglyphic writing of the soul. The fixed facts of 
society, laws, institutions, positive knowledge, were once 
ideas in a projector's brain — thoughts which have been 
forced into facts. The scouted hypothesis of the fifteenth 
century is the time-honored institution of the nineteenth ; 
the heresy of yesterday is the commonplace of to-day. 
We perceive, in every stage of this great movement, a 
certain vital force, a spiritual power, to which we give 

* Delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, 
February, 1848. 



GENIUS. 157 

the name of Genius. From the period when our present 
civilized races ran wild and naked in the woods, and 
dined and supped on each other, to the present time, the 
generality of mankind have been contented with things 
as they were. A small number have conceived of some- 
thing better, or something new. From these come the 
motion and ferment of life ; to them we owe it that exist- 
ence is not a bog but a stream. These are men of genius. 
There are, therefore, two fields for human thought 
and action, the actual and the possible, the realized 
and the real. In the actual, the tangible, the real- 
ized, the vast proportion of mankind abide. The great 
region of the possible, whence all discovery, invention, 
creation, proceed, and which is to the actual as a 
universe to a planet, is the chosen region of Genius. As 
almost every thing which is now actual was once only 
possible, as our present facts and axioms were originally 
inventions or discoveries, it is, under God, to Genius that 
we owe our present blessings. In the past, it created the 
present ; in the present, it is creating the future. It 
builds habitations for us, but its own place is on the van- 
ishing points of human intelligence, — 

" A motion toiling in the gloom, 
The spirit of the years to come, 
learning to mix itself with life." 

The sphere and the influence of Genius it is easier to 



158 GENIUS. 

ascertain than to define its nature. What is Genius ? 
It has been often defined, but each definition has included 
but a portion of its phenomena. According to Dr. John- 
son, it is general force of mind accidentally directed to a 
particular pursuit ; but this does not cover the compre- 
hensive genius of Shakspeare, Leibnitz and Goethe; 
and, besides, accident, circumstance, do not determine 
the direction of narrower minds, but simply furnish the 
occasion on which an inward tendency is manifested. 
The most popular definition is that of Coleridge, who 
calls genius the power of carrying the feelings of child- 
hood into the powers of manhood. Such a power may 
indicate the genius of Coleridge and Wordsworth, but 
did Napoleon conquer at Austerlitz, Newton discover the 
law of gravitation, Shakspeare create Macbeth, by carry- 
ing the feelings of childhood into the powers of man- 
hood ? This mode of defining by individual instances 
is like drawing a map of Massachusetts, and calling it the 
globe — a thing we are very apt to do. 

Indeed, Genius has commonly been incompletely de- 
fined, because each definition has been but a description 
of some order of genius. A true definition would be a 
generalization, made up from many minds, and broad 
enough to include all the results of genius in action and 
thought. Genius is not a single power, but a combina- 
tion of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning ; 



GENIUS. 159 

it judges, but it is not judgment ; it imagines, but it is 
not imagination ; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not 
passion. It is neither, because it is all. It is another 
name for the perfection of human nature, for Genius is 
not a fact but an ideal. It is nothing less than the 
possession of all the powers and impulses of humanity, 
in their greatest possible strength and most harmonious 
combination; and the genius of any particular man is 
great in proportion as he approaches this ideal of univer- 
sal genius. Conceive of a mind in which the powers of 
Napoleon and Howard, Dante and Newton, Luther and 
Shakspeare, Kant and Fulton, were so combined as to 
act in perfect harmony ; a mind, vital in every part, con- 
ceiving everything with intensity and yet conceiving 
everything under its due relations, as swift in its volitions 
as in its thoughts, — conceive of a mind like this, and 
you will have a definition of genius. As it is, it requires 
the energies of all men of genius to produce the results 
of genius. It exists somewhat in fragments. No one 
human mind comprehends all its elements. The nearest 
approach to universality of genius in intellect is Shaks- 
peare; in will, Napoleon; in harmony of combination, 
Washington. It is singular that Washington is not 
generally classed among men of genius. Lord Brougham 
declares him to be the greatest man that ever lived, but 
of moderate talents, — as if being the soul of a revolution 



160 GENIUS. 

and the creator of a country, did not suppose energies 
equal to those employed in the creation of a poem, — as 
if there were any other certain test of genius but its 
influence, any other measure of the power of a cause 
but the magnitude of its effects ! 

But to return. Genius, in its highest meaning, being 
thus an Ideal, which the most powerful natures have but 
approached, which, while it comprehends all men of 
genius, is itself comprehended by none, the question still 
arises, what common quality distinguishes men of genius 
from other men, in practical life, in science, in letters, in 
every department of human thought and action ? This 
common quality is vital energy of mind, — inherent, 
original force of thought and vitality of conception ; a 
quality equally distinguishing the genius of action and 
meditation, making the mind in which it abides alive, 
and capable of communicating intellectual and moral life 
to others. Men in whom this energy glows seem to 
spurn the limitations of matter; to dive beneath the 
forms and appearances to the spirit of things ; to leap the 
gulf which separates positive knowledge from discovery, 
the actual from the possible; and, in their grasp of spir- 
itual realities, in their intense life, they seem to demon- 
strate the immortality of the soul that burns within 
them. They give palpable evidence of infinite capacity, 
of indefinite power of growth. It seems a mockery to 



GENIUS. 161 

limit their life by years, — to suppose that fiery essence 
can ever burn out or be extinguished. This life, this 
energy, this uprising, aspiring flame of thought, — 

" This mind, this spirit, this Promethean spark, 
This lightning of their being," — 

has been variously called power of combination, inven- 
tion, creation, insight; but in the last analysis it is 
resolved into vital energy of soul, to think and to do. 

This quality of genius is sometimes difficult to be 
distinguished from talent, because high genius includes 
talent. It is talent and something more. The usual 
distinction between genius and talent is, that one repre- 
sents creative thought, the other practical skill ; one 
invents, the other applies. But the truth is, that high 
genius applies its own inventions better than talent alone 
can do. A man who has mastered the higher mathe- 
matics does not on that account lose his knowledge of 
arithmetic. Hannibal, Napoleon, Shakspeare, Newton, 
Scott, Burke, Arkwright, — were they not men of talent 
as well as men of genius ? Because a great man does 
not always do what many smaller men can often do as 
well, smaller men must not, therefore, affect to pity him 
as a visionary, and pretend to lick into shape his form- 
less theories. 

But still there doubtless is a marked distinction be- 
tween men of genius and men simply of talent. Talent 
11 



162 GENIUS. 

repeats ; Genius creates. Talent is a cistern ; Genius, a 
fountain. Talent deals with the actual, with discovered 
and realized truths, analyzing, arranging, combining, 
applying positive knowledge, and in action looking to 
precedents. Genius deals with the possible, creates new 
combinations, discovers new laws, and acts from an 
insight into principles. Talent jogs to conclusions to 
which Genius takes giant leaps. Talent accumulates 
knowledge, and has it packed up in the memory ; Genius 
assimilates it with its own substance, grows with every 
new accession, and converts knowledge into power. 
Talent gives out what it has taken in ; Genius, what has 
risen from its unsounded wells of living thought. Talent, 
in difficult situations, strives to untie knots, which Genius 
instantly cuts, with one swift decision. Talent is full of 
thoughts ; Genius, of thought : one has definite acquisi- 
tions ; the other, indefinite power. 

But the most important distinction between the two 
qualities is this : — one, in conception, follows mechanical 
processes ; the other, vital. Talent feebly conceives ob- 
jects with the senses and understanding ; Genius, fusing 
all its powers together in the alembic of an impassioned 
imagination, clutches everything in the concrete, con- 
ceives objects as living realities, gives body to spiritual 
abstractions and spirit to bodily appearances, and, like 



GENIUS. 163 

" A gate of steel 
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back 
His figure and his heat ! " 

It is thus the glorious prerogative of Genius to conceive 
and to present everything as alive; and here is the secret 
of its power. It leads and sways because it communi- 
cates living energy, and strikes directly at the soul, — 
searching out the very sources of our volitions, bowing 
our weak wills before its strong arm, awakening, animat- 
ing, forcing us along its path of thought, or over its waves 
of passion. It commands us because it knows better 
than we what is within us. Soul itself, it knows that, 
in spite of our contemptible disguises, we too have souls 
which must leap up at its voice, and follow whithersoever 
it leads. It claims its rightful mastery over our spirits, 
by awakening us to a sense of our spiritual existence. 
It speaks to us, in our captivity, in the long-forgotten 
language of our native land. It sees us wrapped up in 
the dead cerements of custom, rusting away in the sep- 
ulchre of being, and it cries to us, — " Come forth ! " It 
speaks to us, and we hear; it touches us, and we spring 
to our feet. A crowd of spirits from the realms of the 
deathless come thronging around us ; — from the battle- 
field, where Liberty went down under the brutal hoofs 
of Power, its immortal image trampled in the dust, — 
from the legislative hall, where, amid the collision of 



164 GENIUS. 

adverse intellects, the orator poured his torrent of fire, — 
from the rack and the stake, where the spirit of man 
chanted rapturous hymns in its fierce agonies, and met 
death smiling, — from the cell of the thinker, where 
mind grappled with the mysterious unknown, piercing, 
with its thought of light, the dark veil of unrealized 
knowledge and possible combinations ; — from every 
scene where the soul has been really alive, and impa- 
tiently tossed aside the material conditions which would 
stifle or limit its energies, come the Genii of Thought 
and Action, to rouse us from our sleep of death, to tear 
aside the thin delusions of our conceit, and to pour into 
the shrunken veins of our discrowned spirits the fresh 
tides of mental life. It is this influence of Genius which 
has given motion and progress to society ; prevented the 
ossification of the human heart and brain ; and though, 
in its processes, it may not ever have followed the rules 
laid down in primers, it has at least saved history from 
being the region of geology, and our present society from 
being a collection of fossil remains. 

Thus, of the three requisitions of Genius, the first is 
soul, and the second, soul, and the third, soul. We have 
already seen that almost all genius is particular, with an 
inborn direction to particular pursuits. The tendency 
of its vital force is generally perceived in childhood. I 
can devote but little space to the youth of genius, though 



GENIUS. 165 

the subject is tempting, and furnishes numberless anec- 
dotes of the earnestness, the intensity, with which the 
great mind early abandons itself to its irrepressible im- 
pulses. Carnot, who, as one of the Committee of Public 
Safety during the French Ee volution, directed the opera- 
tions of fourteen armies, and hurled back the tide of 
invasion which came rolling in over the Alps, the Pyre- 
nees and the Rhine, was taken, when a child, to the 
theatre, where some siege was clumsily represented. 
Seeing that the attacking party were so placed as to be 
commanded by a battery, he astonished the audience by 
demanding that the general should change his position, 
and cried out to him that his men were in fire. — The 
young genius early exults in the contemplation of power 
and beauty. During Scott's childhood, a frightful thun- 
der-storm raged at Edinburgh, which made his brothers 
and the domestics huddle together in one room, shiver- 
ing with fear at every peal. Young Walter was found 
lying on his back in the garden, the rain pitilessly pelt- 
ing his face, while he, almost convulsed with delight, 
shouted at every flash, " bonnie ! bonnie ! " Schiller 
was found by his father, on a similar occasion, perched 
upon a tree ; and on being harshly questioned as to his 
object, whimpered out that he wanted to see where the 
thunder came from. Byron's first verses, when a child 
of four or five years, displayed the same perverseness 



166 GENIUS. 

and unbridled vehemence which afterwards flamed out 
in Manfred and Cain. An old lady near his house, who 
entertained the belief that on her death her soul would 
reside in the moon, bothered him considerably in his 
childish pranks. He revenged himself in four lines : — 

" In Nottingham County there lives, at Swan Green, 
As curst an old lady as ever was seen ; 
And when she does die, xchich I hope will be soon, 
She firmly believes she will go to the moon." 

It would be needless to multiply instances, familiar to 
everybody, that the man's genius is born with him. 
Legislator, reformer, soldier, poet, artist, thinker, — the 
child is still " the father of the man." In some instances, 
it must be admitted, the whole man does not grow. Na- 
poleon's youth prefigured his maturity, and something 
else. The so .-ereign who crushed the heart of his queen 
in his mailed hand, was once a man of sentiment. 
When quite young, he fell in love with a young maiden ; 
they contrived little meetings ; and he afterwards averred 
that their whole happiness then consisted in eating cher- 
ries together. 

We have seen that genius is vital energy of soul. In 
itself it supposes a harmonious combination of will, intel- 
lect and sensibility ; but, as manifested in men of genius, 
this combination is not perfect. Hence the division of 
powerful natures into men of action and men of medita- 



GENIUS. 167 

tion; men in whom will predominates, and men in whom 
thought predominates. In the one case, the vital energy 
of the mind takes a practical direction, works visibly on 
society, and produces events. In the other, it takes the 
direction of meditation, influences society by methods 
more strictly spiritual, and produces poetry, science, the 
fine arts, everything that stimulates and gratifies the 
inward sense of truth, beauty, and power. 

And first let us refer to the genius of action, to genius 
whose thoughts are read in deeds. Men of action may 
be classed in three divisions : — those who exercise their 
energies for what they deem the truth ; those who exer- 
cise them for personal interest and ambition ; and those 
in whom selfish and disinterested motives are strangely 
blended. The greatness of action includes immoral as 
well as moral greatness, — Cortes and Napoleon, as well 
as Luther and Washington. Its highest exemplification 
is where energy of will carries out a great original 
thought to a practical result, with uprightness of moral 
intention ; and perhaps the noblest example of this is in 
Columbus. Its lowest exemplification is where great en- 
err: rs of will are divorced from conscience and human- 
ity; and perhaps the lowest example of this is in Pizarro. 
But neither by the side of Columbus nor Pizarro can we 
place the moral trimmer, without any definite purpose, 
whose heart is continually aching for the crimes of the 



168 GENIUS. 

bad, but whose will is too infirm to battle bravely for the 
good. Such a person may shine among well meaning 
people, but his claims to greatness of any kind are ridic- 
ulous. Pizarro was a buccaneer, but he had, at least, an 
object, which was to him dearer than life, and to compass 
it he displayed the valor of a knight and the endurance of 
a martyr. How strangely does his conduct at the island 
of Gallo contrast with the tongue-valiant cowardice 
which characterizes the feebly good ! After suffering all 
that fatigue, famine and pestilence could inflict, short of 
death, a vessel arrived which offered to carry him and 
his companions back to Panama. To go was to abandon 
forever the project of conquering and plundering Peru. 
Pizarro drew his sword, and traced a line on the sand 
with it from east to west. Then turning to the south, 
he said to his band of immortal pirates : — " Friends and 
comrades ! on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the 
drenching storm, desertion and death ; on this side, ease 
and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches ; here, 
Panama with its poverty. Choose, each man, what best 
becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the 
south." Now, as long as bad men display qualities like 
these, so long will they rule ; for to qualities like these 
is given the dominion of the world. Such men, to be 
checked, are not to be talked about, but to be wrestled 
with, — to be bravely met by superior force of will, and 



GENIUS. 169 

overthrown. Never will this be done by the moral bab- 
ble of men who wish to serve God, and wish, at the same 
time, to live comfortably all their days. Well has the 
great Christian poet of the age affirmed, — 

" The law 
By which mankind now suffers is most just. 
For, by superior energies, more strict 
Affiance in each other, faith more firm 
In their unhallowed principles, the bad 
Have fairly earned a victory o'er the weak, 
The vacillating, inconsistent good." 

The great characteristic of men of active genius is a 
sublime self-confidence, springing, not from self-conceit, 
but from an intense identification of the man with his 
object, which lifts him altogether above the fear of dan- 
ger and death, which gives to his enterprise a character 
of insanity to the common eye, and which communicates 
an almost superhuman audacity to his will. Men of this 
stamp seem to have a clear and bright vision of what is 
hidden from other men, and to push instinctively forward, 
through every obstacle, to its attainment. They seem to 
hear voices crying to them from the mysterious unknown, 
and to answer the call in flashes of supernatural energy. 
They ever give the impression of spirits, to whom mate- 
rial obstacles are as flax in the fire. Judge from their 
words and their deeds, and you would suppose their 



170 GENIUS. 

bodies partook, like Milton's angels, of incorporeal sub- 
stance, which, if pierced or cloven, would instantly re- 
unite. They have no fear of death, because their souls 
are thoroughly alive ; and the idea of death never occurs 
to a live mind. In following the career of one of these 
fierce and flashing intelligences, our astonishment finds 
vent in some such words as the heroism of Duke Sopho- 
cles forced from Fletcher's honest centurion : 

" By Romulus, he is all soul, I think ; 
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved." 

Such men, also, dart their souls into vast bodies of men, 
become the animating spirit of great enterprises, and 
communicate vitality even to those whose submission 
they enforce. Every soldier in the army of Caesar and 
Napoleon, felt the soul of Caesar or Napoleon glowing 
within his own breast. While obeying another will, new 
life seemed poured into his own. Audacity and a beau- 
tiful contempt of death breathe and burn in the words 
and deeds of such commanders. " My lads," said Napo- 
leon to some raw recruits, " you must not fear death ; 
when soldiers brave death, they drive him into the 
enemy's ranks." The great Conde, when twice repulsed 
with frightful slaughter at Fribourg, led his soldiers up 
in person to the mouths of the enemy's cannon, and 
hurled his marshal's baton over the intrenchments. 
Nothing could resist the impetuosity of French soldiers, 



GENIUS. 171 

after such a spur had been given to their energies. 
"Follow my plume!" said Henry the Fourth to his 
knights; — "you will always find it on the road to vic- 
tory." " Hang thyself, brave Crillon," said he, in the 
same spirit of chivalry ; "we have fought at Arques, and 
thou wast not there." Speak thus to the higher senti- 
ments of men on great occasions, and you will find their 
souls will instinctively mount up to their native region. 
When the Spanish Armada threatened England, the 
Queen of England spoke to her troops in words warm 
from her own lion heart. She did not tell them that an 
invasion would prejudice their interests, or even their 
liberties, but she wondered that Parma and proud Spain 
should dare to invade her dominions. The success of 
Luther was in a great degree owing to his indomitable 
will, — a will which forced its way through obstacles 
which might have daunted armies, and gave to his char- 
acter that moral intensity, which fitted him to be the 
leader in what Guizot calls, " the great insurrection of 
human thought against authority." When advised not 
to go to a city, notoriously thronged with his 'enemies, 
he said, " Were there as many devils there as roof-tiles, 
I would on ! " This is the feeling of the great reformer 
everywhere; — to make life a battle for the truth; to 
strike heavier blows for the Right than others can for the 
Wrong ; in one word, to dare ! This principle has been 



172 GENIUS. 

repeatedly caricatured by those who have pretended to 
represent it. It was vilely caricatured in that infernal 
farce, the French Eevolution, in which audacity and 
mediocrity formed a hideous union. But it is no less the 
virtue of genius because it is the vice of folly. There is 
a great difference between the dogmatism of knowledge 
and the dogmatism of ignorance. Kepler might say, 
that if God had waited five thousand years before he had 
raised up a man capable of comprehending His wonderful 
works, he could wait a thousand for men to comprehend 
his discoveries ; but such language as this is impotent 
trash, worthy only to be received with a storm of hisses, 
when uttered by pretentious mediocrity. 

This energy and audacity of will characterizes all rul- 
ing public men, — statesmen, generals, reformers, orators. 
In the great orator, especially, it is seen in the condensa- 
tion, the burning vehemence, the brief, stern strokes, with 
which he pierces through the reason and through the 
passions of his audience, directly at their volitions, — 
spurning, trampling, upon all opposing wills, hurrying the 
souls whom he has taken captive onward, ever onward, 
to the insatiable object which impatiently beckons in the 
distance ! Demosthenes, the greatest of orators, is the 
great master of this intense and rapid movement. He 
never repeats ; never, says Brougham, comes back upon 
the ground, " which he has once utterly wasted and 



GENIUS. 173 

withered up by the tide of fire he has rolled over it." 
It was this intense will, this force of being, which chiefly 
distinguished the arrogant and ruling genius of Chatham. 
He cowed those whom he could neither convince nor 
persuade. A country member of Parliament once rose to 
accuse him of a palpable inconsistency in his conduct. 
He had hardly mumbled a few words before he was 
looked down into his seat by the steady scorn which 
blazed upon him from Chatham's eye. It was this force 
which gave such audacity to his bursts of blended opinion 
and passion — as in that well-known exclamation in the 
House of Lords, — "They tell me that America has 
resisted. I am rejoiced to hear it ! " " Sugar, my 
lords," said he, on another occasion, in his deep, grave 
voice. A well-bred sneer instantly smiled on the lips of 
his noble auditors, at the disparity between the term and 
the tone. Chatham saw it, kindled at the insult, and 
repeated sugar three times, in his fiercest tones and with 
his most violent gesticulations, until he awed them into 
putting on civil faces. He then asked, derisively, " "Who 
will laugh at sugar now?" We sometimes see this 
power exercised in private life, and controversies settled 
by force of will, instead of force of argument. Dr. John- 
son wielded it with admirable energy. The records of 
Robert Hall's conversation boil over with an audacity of 
expression, which cuts clean through the " linen decen- 



174 



GENIUS. 



cies" of polite life. " Mr. Hall," said one of his parish- 
ioners, "I understand you are going to marry Miss 

." — " I marry Miss ! I would as soon 

marry Beelzebub's eldest daughter, and go home and live 
with the old folks." Again, speaking of Dr. Ryland, he 
exclaimed, " Why, sir, Dr. Ryland 's all piety ; all piety 
together, sir. If there were not room in heaven, God 
would turn out an archangel for him." His proposal to 
his housekeeper had a similar wildness. " Betty, do you 
love the Lord Jesus ? " — " Yes, sir." — " And Betty, do 
you love me ? " — " Yes, sir." They were married at once. 
Perhaps the most wonderful example of this audacity 
in a mind at once vast and flexible, intense and compre- 
hensive, is in Caesar, — a man to whose commanding 
genius empire seemed but another term for action. 
Compared with him, Alexander seems but a hot-headed 
boy, and even Napoleon " pales his uneffectual fire." 
The amazing strength of his mind is not so remarkable 
as its plastic character — the ease with which it accom- 
modated itself to every emergency — its wonderful fusion 
of will, intelligence and passion. It never hardened in 
any part, and all its powers were thus capable of instan- 
taneous concentration. Though his determinations were 
as sure as they were swift, we still never speak of his 
iron will, feeling that such a term would not express its 
ethereal strength, and its felicity of adaptation to every 



GENIUS. 175 

occasion. The acts of Cresar affect us like unexpected 
flashes of imagination in a great poem. At the age of 
seventeen, in flying from the power of Sylla, he fell into 
the clutches of pirates. They fixed his ransom at twenty 
talents. "It is too little," he said; "you shall have 
fifty ; but once free, I will crucify every one of you ;" 
and he did it. When his favorite legion mutinied, he 
abandoned them before they could abandon him, and they 
followed him like spaniels, suing for forgiveness. In 
Spain, his legions would obey neither his entreaties nor 
commands to attack the vast army opposed to them. 
But they knew not the resources of their commander. 
Seizing a shield, he cried, " I will die here ! " and rushed 
singly upon the Spanish ranks. Two hundred arrows 
flew against him, when within ten paces of the enemy, — 
and his soldiers could not but charge in his support. At 
Rome, when he heard of plots to assassinate him, he 
proudly dismissed his guards, and ever afterwards walked 
through the streets alone and unarmed. Well might his 
"honorable murderers" have wondered, as that withered 
frame lay before them, pierced with twenty stabs, that a 
body so worn and weak could have contained so vast and 
vehement a soul. In all history we have no other 
instance of a mind of such ethereal make, divorced from 
moral principle. The Romans thought him a god, and 
to all posterity he will be the great, bad man of the world, 



176 GENIUS. 

Interpenetrate the will of Luther, the benevolence of 
Howard, the religion of Fenelon, with the mind of 
Goethe, and you would have a man as resistless for duty 
as Caesar was for glory. But, you may say, this military 
courage is not spiritual, but physical. Let us hear the 
testimony of one qualified to speak to this point, — of 
one who was both warrior and writer, — the testimony 
of the great tragic poet of Greece. How run the lines 
written by himself to serve for his own epitaph ? 

" Athenian iEschylus, Eurphorian's son, 

Buried in Geta's fields, these words declare ; 
His deeds are registered at Marathon, 
Known to tne deep- haired Mede who met him there." 

Have we not here the same stern, fiery, invulnerable 
soul, which clothed in verse of such imperishable grand- 
eur the awful agonies of the chained Prometheus ? 

But to return : Brutus has been placed above Caesar 
in greatness by those who write books for children. 
Now, Brutus had no genius ; was simply a proud, 
inflexible, hard-minded and narrow-minded patrician, 
whose notion of liberty was below that of Russia's 
autocrat, and whose notion of virtue was worse than his 
notion of liberty. " Virtue," said he, just before his 
death, — " vain word, futile shadow, slave of chance! 
Alas ! I believed in thee ! " — Here a heroical soul ! Here 
a great moral genius ! Why, Caesar would not have said 



GENIUS. 177 

such a thing even of vice ! No man who had vitally con- 
ceived virtue, as a living reality, — ever identified him- 
self with it, — could thus have mocked its awful immor- 
tality with his peevish atheism. He called virtue a 
word, because to him it was a barren proposition about 
virtue, to which his understanding assented, — not a liv- 
ing realization of virtue, which his whole nature adored. 
How mean does such a man appear by the side of such 
a woman as Joan of Arc, the saint of France ! How 
much more force dwelt in the little peasant maiden than 
in Home's proud patrician ! She, in the might and the 
simplicity of her nature, identified herself with duty, 
and, armed in her intelligence and faith, was, in her 
sphere, as resistless as Caesar, — because her mind was 
as vital. From the time her soul first caught the sound 
of the cathedral bells, chiming above her cottage home, 
to the period when she fell into the gripe of the grim 
English wolves, her life was one expression of holiness, 
purity and action. Viewed in connection with the 
Satanic passions of that dark period, she seems to de- 
scend upon her age as a heavenly visitant, with celestial 
beauty and celestial strength. France has no nobler 
boast than her heroic genius ; England no fouler stain 
than her brutal murder. She is among the greatest of 
the great of action. It is almost needless to say that in 
English history she appears variously as witch, wanton, 
12 



178 GENIUS. 

sorceress and fanatic, — not as the wisest, purest, ablest 
intelligence of her time. 

We have seen, so far, that vital energy of soul is the 
great characteristic of the genius of action. It is not 
less so of the genius of meditation. We call the one 
force of character ; the other, force of mind : but vital 
thought is at heart of both. True depth and strength 
of character is in proportion to the living spiritual prin- 
ciple within the man. Force, power, dominion, are 
traced in letters of fire on the brow of the thinker, as on 
the crown of the actor. From both come those kindling, 
quickening influences, which move the world. But to 
the thinker, the range of the man of action is all too nar- 
row to satisfy the creative energy of his intellect. The 
reformer, the soldier, the patriot, each commonly over- 
estimates the importance of his special object, from not 
vitally conceiving its relations as well as itself. Shaks- 
peare cannot do the work of Luther, because he is on 
an eminence where Luther's work falls into its right 
relations to other possible reforms, w T hich Luther feebly 
conceives or fiercely underestimates. To Luther it is 
the thing to be done ; to Shakspeare, only one thing to 
be done. Shakspeare, again, would not expend his ener- 
gies for the objects of Napoleon, because he sees further 
and deeper than Napoleon into their nature. Yet we 
are not from this to conclude that the force exercised in 



GENIUS. 179 

the region whence events indirectly spring, is not as 
great as that exercised in the region whence events 
directly spring. Influence is the measure of power ; and 
he must be a dealer in hardy assertions who shall say 
that the influence on mankind of men of action has been 
greater than men of thought. In truth, action is influ- 
ential, as meditation is influential, just in proportion to 
tiie vital thought it embodies and represents. 

It may be as well here to mention a common preju- 
dice against genius, that it is a quality of idle, lazy men ; 
of clever vagabonds, who have a knack of seizing some 
things by intuition which others obtain by logic ; of men. 
who spontaneously perceive what others laboriously inves- 
tigate. If a child flouts at parental authority, abhors 
study, investigates the condition of hen-roosts, and prac- 
tically illustrates new views of property, his sloth, trickery 
and thieving, are apt to be laid to his genius. All mis- 
erable pretenders, poetasters, quacks, ranters, — disciples 
of disorder everywhere, — are considered to be fools and 
vagabonds in virtue of their genius. The general feeling 
is well expressed in an anecdote told of Mason. Some 
person brought him a subscription paper for the poems of 
Ann Yearsley, the inspired milk-maid, describing her as 
a heaven-born genius. He gave four-and-sixpence, — 
" four shillings," he said, " for charity, and the odd six- 
pence for her heaven-born genius." The work-house, 



180 GENIUS. 

the jail, the penitentiary, are considered to be full of men 
of genius. The quality is held to be naturally opposed 
to order, to oommon-sense, and to worldly success. 
Even where a man like Burns, or Otway, or Cowper, 
filled a nation with his fame, it is still remembered that 
Otway starved to death, that Burns died drunk, that 
Cowper died mad. " There 's small choice," cries Medi- 
ocrity, "in rotten apples." People therefore consider 
genius, at the best, a doubtful benefit : — 

11 The booby father craves a booby son, 
And by Heaven's blessing thinks himself undone." 

Now, admitting that Genius, working in bad organiza- 
tions, and exposed to a continual conflict with surround- 
ing malignity and stupidity, may end in " despondency 
and madness," — may seem, as Kousseau's did to Byron, 

"A tree 
On fire with lightning, with ethereal flame 
Kindled and blasted," — 

yet the fault is not in having too much genius, but in 
not having genius enough. Take Milton, the invincible ; 
that adamantine strength of will which made such 
wild work among the sensualists and renegades of his 
time, — was not that a portion of his genius ? When a 
great man sinks into despondency, or fear, or inaction, 
his genius slumbers or has departed. He is an Achilles, 



GENIUS. 181 

dozing in luxurious sloth, while the plains are ringing 
with war ; and to him should be addressed the trumpet 
call of Patroclus : — 

" Sweet, 
Rouse thyself ; and the weak, wanton Cupid 
Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, 
And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane, 
Be shook to air ! " 

Indeed, genius in thought supposes energy of will to 
rouse energies of intellect, and is the exact opposite of 
laziness or indulgence. It is self-directed power; energy, 
which, if it do not come spontaneously, must be induced. 
As far as it is genius it is labor, the hardest work that 
man can do, and its discoveries and combinations are 
earned by the very sweat of the brain. It is true, thoughts 
seem sometimes to fall into the mind of the poet, like 
stray birds of paradise ; but be sure they have been lured 
thither by the poet's potent spells. Again, in the exter- 
nal activity of men of genius there are great differences, 
from the physical inertia of Thomson, lazily biting the 
ripe side of a peach on the tree, his hands thrust immov- 
ably in his pockets, to the hurricane movement of Byron, 
who had, if we may believe Mr. Gilnllan, " the activity 
of a scalded fiend ; " yet the Seasons were as much 
the result of inward energy as Childe Harold. But the 
thought of genius, you may say, comes spontaneously, 



182 GENIUS. 

— swift as lightning. Yes; but that gathering together 
of forces, which precedes and causes the lightning, — what 
is that ? The thought of the law of gravitation flashed 
across the mind of Newton ; but the mental labor which 
for years preceded it, the millions of thoughts which 
came from that exhaustless fountain before the right one 
flashed, — there was the work of a giant. The mind of 
genius, being vital, grows with exercise; assimilates 
knowledge into the very life-blood of thought, every new 
acquisition becoming additional power ; and though the 
last result may seem simple, the processes by which it is 
mastered are complex and mighty. In view of the diffi- 
culties to be overcome, and the annoyances to be tossed 
aside, by the original thinker, Buffon defined genius as 
patience. In the power of patient labor, Newton mod- 
estly saw the difference between himself and other men* 
He did not consider that this power of patient labor was 
his genius ; that continuity and concentration of thought 
are in proportion to the size and vitality of the thinking 
principle. Let those who prate about indolent genius 
conceive of the energy of Scott. At the age of fifty-six 
he resolutely braced up his energies of mind to pay a 
debt of six or seven hundred thousand dollars, by litera- 
ture. In three years he produced thirty volumes. His 
frame began to break down. Dr. Abercrombie implored 
him to desist from writing. " I tell you what it is, doc- 



GENIUS. 183 

tor," said Scott, " when Molly puts the kettle on, you 
might as well say, don't boil ! " 

„ This living energy of mind, it is hard to kindle. How 
many go down to the grave without having known, dur- 
ing a long life, what thought is ! How many abide in 
miserable superstitions, victims of every quack in religion, 
politics and literature, their minds mere collections of 
chips and hearsays, feeling their degradation, yet prefer- 
ring it to the labor of mental effort ! This slavery of the 
soul, these chains clanking upon every utterance of opin- 
ion, can only be broken by the strength within the man. 
It is a comparatively easy task to induce men to sacrifice 
comfort and wealth, to be fanatics, and very brave fanat- 
ics, for any cruel nonsense which has obtained in the 
world, — but to induce them to think, — oh ! that is 
requiring too much for the energies of mortal man! 
And yet, forsooth, the world is becoming too intellectual ! 
We educate the intellect too much! " My friends," said 
Dr. Johnson, " clear your minds of cant ! " 

Indeed, education can hardly be too intellectual, unless 
by intellectual you mean parrot knowledge, and other 
modes of mind-slaughter. No education deserves the 
name, unless it develops thought, — unless it pierces 
down to the mysterious spiritual principle of mind, and 
starts that into activity and growth. There, all educa- 
tion, intellectual, moral, religious, begins ; for morality, 



184 GENIUS. 

religion, intelligence, have all one foundation in vital 
thought ; — that is, in thought which conceives all ob- 
jects with which it deals, whether temporal or eternal, 
visible or invisible, as living realities, not as barren 
propositions. Here is the vital principle of all growth 
in learning, in virtue, in intelligence, in holiness. If this 
fail, there is no hope : 

" The pillared firmament is rottenness, 
And earth's base built on stubble." 

Thus force of being, to labor, to create, to pluck out 
the heart of nature's mystery, — this is the law of genius. 
It would be impossible here to follow this live and life- 
giving thought of man in its invasion of the possible and 
the unknown. Its result is human knowledge, — the 
sciences of mind and matter, poetry and the plastic arts, 
with their myriad untraceable influences upon society 
and individual character. Genius, mental power, wher- 
ever you look, you see the radiant footprints of its victo- 
rious progress. It has surrounded your homes with com- 
fort ; it has given you the command of the blind forces 
of matter ; it has exalted and consecrated your affections; 
it has brought God's immeasurable universe nearer to 
your hearts and imaginations ; it has made flowers of 
paradise spring up even in poor men's gardens. And, 
above all, it is never stationary ; its course being ever 
onward to new triumphs, its repose but harmonious ac- 



GENIUS. 185 

tivity, its acquisitions but stimulants to discoveries. 
Answering to nothing but the soul's illimitable energies, 
it is always the preacher of hope, and brave endeavor, 
and unwearied, elastic effort. It is hard to rouse in their 
might these energies of thought; but when once roused, 
when felt tingling along every nerve of sensation, the 
whole inward being thrilling with their enkindling inspi- 
ration, 

" And all the God comes rushing on the soul," 

there seem to be no limits to their capacity, and obsta- 
cles shrivel into ashes in their fiery path. This deep feel- 
ing of power and joy, this ecstasy of the living soul, this 
untamed and untamable energy of Genius, — you can- 
not check its victorious career as it leaps exultingly from 
discovery to discovery, new truths ever beckoning implor- 
ingly in the dim distance, a universe ever opening and 
expanding before it, and above all a Voice still crying, 
On! on! — On! though the clay fall from the souPs 
struggling powers ! — On ! though the spirit burn through 
its garment of flesh, as the sun through mist ! — On ! 

on! 

"Along the line of limitless desires." 



LECTURE VI. * 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

A prominent characteristic of the present day, and in 
many respects an admirable one, is the universal atten- 
tion given to the subject of bodily health ; but, like many 
other movements founded on half-truths, it has been 
pushed by fanaticism into ludicrous perversions. Physi- 
ology has been systematized into a kind of popular gos- 
pel, in whose doctrines the soul seems of little import- 
ance in comparison with the gastric juice. Physic hav- 
ing become a fashion, a valetudinary air is now the sign 
of your true coxcomb; and every idle person has his pet 
complaint, which he nurses in some genteel infirmary. 
There is an universal cant about health ; every city and 
hamlet is beleaguered by the hosts of Hippocrates, the 
floods of Hydropathy, and the animalculae of Homeop- 
athy ; and no person can venture into the street without 
being assaulted by some Hygeian highwayman, who 

* Delivered before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College, 
July 25, 1849. 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 187 

presents a phial to his head, and demands his patience 
or his purse. Now, the practical consequence of this 
deification of the body and worship of dietetics, is to 
bring men under the dominion of a sickly selfishness and 
a craven cowardice, while pretending to teach them the 
physical laws of their being. Man obeys the highest law 
of his being when he takes his life in his hand, and 
boldly ventures it for something he values more than 
self. Life cast away for truth or duty, even for fame or 
knowledge, is better than life saved for the sake of living. 
But your true disciple of physiological religion, with his 
morbid consciousness of that collection of veins, bones, 
muscles and appetites, which he calls himself, would 
consider it a monstrous violation of the physical laws of 
his being to obey a benevolent impulse which endangered 
a blood-vessel, or to purchase the discovery of a new 
truth at the expense of deranged digestion : and he would 
survey with lazy wonder the strange ignorance of How- 
ard, penetrating into pestilential prisons ; of Washington, 
exposing his person to a storm of bullets ; of Ridley, 
serenely yielding his frame to that baptism of fire which 
enrolled him forever in the glorious army of martyrs. 
Such acts as these were doubtless violations of physical 
laws, and prove that heroes are not framed on accurate 
physiological principles. 

Indeed, health and disease, in their highest meaning, 



188 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

refer more to the mind than to the body. A code of 
ethics built on physical laws can but inculcate a selfish, 
superficial prudence ; and prudence, except in weaklings, 
will not restrain self-indulgence, and ought not to restrain 
self-sacrifice. There are no duties, therefore, which are 
not resolvable into moral duties; no vices which have 
not their scorpion nest in the heart. Do you suppose 
that any knowing prattle about the breathing or digesting 
apparatus will still the hoarse clamor of gluttony and 
sensuality ? Will it relax the grasp of Satanic pride ? In 
truth, you will find that prudence without conscience 
holds but a rein of flax on the wild war-horses of passion. 
But it is a characteristic weakness of the day to super- 
ficialize evil ; to spread a little cold cream over Pande- 
monium, erect a nice little earthly paradise upon it, and 
then to rush into misanthropy because the thin structure 
instantly melts. Indeed, it is at the very core of the 
mind that we must search for the principles of health and 
disease, — in the mysteries of will, intelligence, senti- 
ment and passion, rather than in the organs which are 
their instruments or victims. Besides, bodily maladies 
may be badges of disgrace, or titles of honor; your 
drunkard and your philosopher may both take their " leap 
into the dark" from apoplexy ; and there is a great dif- 
ference between Milton, sacrificing his eyesight from the 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 189 

love of liberty, and Byron, sacrificing his digestion from 
the love of gin. 

The subject, therefore, to which I would call your 
attention, is intellectual health and disease, as it exists in 
individuals and in nations. To one who reflects on the 
nature and capacity of the human mind, there is some- 
thing inconceivably awful in its perversions. Look at it 
as it comes, fresh and plastic, from its Maker ; look at it 
as it returns, stained and hardened, to its Maker. Con- 
ceive of a mind, a living soul, with the germs of faculties 
which infinity cannot exhaust, as it first beams upon you 
in its glad morning of existence ; quivering with life and 
joy; exulting in the bounding sense of its developing 
energies ; beautiful, and brave, and generous, and joyous, 
and free, — the clear, pure spirit bathed in the auroral 
light of its unconscious immortality : and then follow it, 
in its dark passage through life, as it stifles and kills, one 
by one, every inspiration and aspiration of its being, until 
it becomes but a dead soul entombed in a living frame. 
It may be that a selfish frivolity has sunk it into con- 
tented worldliness, or given it the vapid air of complacent 
imbecility. It may be that it is marred and disfigured 
by the hoof-prints of appetite, its humanity extinguished 
in the mad tyranny of animal ferocities. It may be that 
pride has stamped the scowl of hatred upon its front ; that 
avarice and revenge, set on fire of hell, have blasted and 



190 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

blackened its unselfish affections. The warm sensibility, 
gushing spontaneously out in world-wide sympathies, — 
the bright and strong intellect, eager for action and 
thirsting for truth, — the rapturous devotion, mounting 
upwards in a pillar of flame to God, — all gone, and 
only remembered as childish enthusiasm, to point the 
sneer of the shrewd, and the scoff of the brutal ! Where, 
in this hard mass of animated clay, wrinkled by cunning 
or brutalized by selfishness, are the power and joy proph- 
esied in the aspirations of youth ? 

" Whither hath fled the visionary gleam ? 
Where is it now, the glory and the dream ? " 

To give the philosophy of this mental disease, to sub- 
ject the mind to that scrutiny which shall account for its 
perversions, we must pass behind its ordinary operations 
of understanding, sensibility and imagination, and attempt 
to clutch its inmost spirit and essence. Now, an analysis 
of our consciousness, or rather a contemplation of the 
mysterious processes of our inward life, reveals no facul- 
ties and no impulses which can be disconnected from 
our personality. The mind is no collection of self-acting 
powers and passions, but a vital, indissoluble unit and 
person, capable, it is true, of great variety of manifesta- 
tion, but still in its nature a unit, not an aggregate. 
For the purposes of science, or verbal convenience, 
we may call its various operations by different names, 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 191 

according as it perceives, feels, understands or imag- 
ines ; but the moment science breaks it up into a 
series of disconnected parts, and considers each part 
by itself as a separate power, that moment the living 
principle of mind is lost, and the result is an anar- 
chy of faculties. Fortunately, however, we cannot free 
ourselves, by any craft of analysis, from personal pro- 
nouns. A man who speaks or acts, instinctively men- 
tions it as — I said, I did. We do not say that Milton's 
imagination wrote Paradise Lost, but that Milton wrote 
it. There is no mental operation in which the whole 
mind is not present ; nothing produced but by the joint 
action of all its faculties, under the direction of its central 
personality. This central principle of mind is spiritual 
force, — capacity to cause, to create, to assimilate, to be. 
This underlies all faculties ; interpenetrates, fuses, directs 
all faculties. This thinks, this feels, this imagines, this 
worships ; this is what glows with health, this is what is 
enfeebled and corrupted by disease. Call it what you 
please, — will, personality, individuality, character, force 
of being; but recognize it as the true spiritual power 
which constitutes a living soul. This is the only pecu- 
liarity which separates the impersonal existence of a 
vegetable from the personal life of a man. The material 
universe is instinct with spiritual existence, but only in 
man is it individualized into spiritual life. 



192 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

Now, there is no such thing as faculty which has not 
its root in this personal force. Without this, thought is 
but insanity, and action, fate. Men do not stumble, and 
blunder, and happen into Iliads, and iEneids, and Divina 
Commedias, and Othellos, in a drunken dream of poetic 
inspiration, but work and grow up to them. It is com- 
mon, I know, to point to some lazy gentleman, and say 
that there is a protuberance on his forehead or temple 
sufficiently large to produce a Hamlet or a Principia, if 
he only had an active temperament. But the thing 
which produces Hamlets and Principias is not physical 
temperament, but spiritual power. What a man does 
is the real test of what a man is ; and to declare that 
he has great capacity but nothing great to set his 
capacity in motion, is an absurdity in terms. 

This mind, this free spiritual force, cannot grow, 
cannot even exist, by itself. It can only grow by assim- 
ilating something external to itself, the very condition of 
mental life being the exercise of power within on objects 
without. The form and superficial qualities of objects it 
perceives ; their life and spirit it conceives. Only what 
the mind conceives, it assimilates and draws into its own 
life ; — intellectual conception indicating a penetrating 
vision into the heart of things, through a fierce, firm 
exertion of vital creative force. In this distinction 
between perception and conception, we have a principle 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 193 

which accounts for the limited degree in which so many- 
persons grow in intelligence and character, in grace and 
gracelessness. Here, also, is the distinction between 
assent and faith, theory and practice. In the one case, 
opinions lie on the surface of the mind, mere objects, the 
truth of which it perceives, but which do not influence 
its will ; in the other, ideas penetrate into the very sub- 
stance of the mind, become one with it, and are springs 
of living thought and action. For instance, you may 
cram whole folios of morality and divinity into the 
heads of Dick Turpin and Captain Kidd, and both will 
cordially assent to their truth ; but the captives of Dick's 
blunderbuss will still have to give up their purses, and 
the prisoners of Kidd's piracy will still have to walk the 
plank. On the other hand, you may pour all varieties 
of immoral opinions and images into the understanding 
of a pure and high nature, and there they will remain, 
unassimilated, uncorrupting ; his mind, like that of Ion, 

" Though shapes of ill 
May hover round its surface, glides in light. 
And takes no shadow from them." 

In accordance with the same principle, all knowledge, 
however imposing in its appearance, is but superficial 
knowledge, if it be merely the mind's furniture, not the 
mind's nutriment. It must be transmuted into mind, as 
food is into blood, to become wisdom and power. There 
13 



194 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

is many a human parrot and memory-monger, who 
has read and who recollects more history than Webster ; 
but in Webster, history has become judgment, foresight, 
executive force, mind. That seemingly instinctive sa- 
gacity, by which an able man does exactly the right thing 
at the right moment, is nothing but a collection of facts 
thus assimilated into thought. This power of instanta- 
neous action without reflection is the only thing which 
saves men in great emergencies ; but far from being inde- 
pendent of knowledge and experience, it is their noblest 
result. Many of the generals opposed to Napoleon 
understood military science as well as he did ; but he 
beat them on every occasion where victory depended on 
a wise movement made at a moment's thought, because 
science had been transfused into his mind, while it was 
only attached to theirs. Every truly practical man, 
whether he be merchant, mechanic, or agriculturalist, 
thus transmutes his experience into intelligence, until his 
will operates with the celerity of instinct. In the order 
of intellectual development, intuition does not precede 
observation and reflection, but is their last perfection. 
First, slow steps, cautious examination, comparison, rea- 
soning ; then, thought and action, swift, sharp and sure, 
as the lightning. 

If the mind thus grows by assimilating external 
objects, it is plain that the character of the objects it 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 195 

assimilates will determine the form of its development, 
and its health or disease. Mental health consists in the 
self-direction of mental power, in the capacity to perceive 
its own relations to objects and the relations of objects to 
each other, and to choose those which will conduce to its 
enlargement and elevation. Disease occurs both when it 
loses its self-direction, and its self-distrust. When it loses 
its self-direction, it surrenders itself to every outward 
impression ; when it loses its self-distrust, it surrenders 
itself to every inward whim. In the one case, it loses all 
moral and intellectual character, becomes unstrung, sen- 
timental, dissolute, with feebleness at the very heart of 
its being ; in the other, it perversely misconceives and 
discolors external things, views every object as a mirror 
of self, and, having no reverence for aught above itself, 
subsides into a poisonous mass of egotism, conceit, and 
falsehood. Thus disease occurs both when the mind loses 
itself in objects, and when objects are lost in it, — when 
it parts with will, and when it becomes wilful. The last 
consequence of will submerged is sensuality, brutality, 
slavishness; the last consequence of will perverted is 
Satanic pride. Now, it is an almost universal law, that 
the diseased weak, the men of unrestrained appetites, 
shall become the victims and slaves of the diseased strong, 
the men of unrestrained wills, and that the result of this 
relation shall be misery, decay and death, to both. Here 



196 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

is the principle of all slavery, political, intellectual, and 
religious, in individuals and in communities. 

Thus if the primitive principle of mind be simply the 
capacity to assimilate external objects, and if objects in 
this process become mind and character, it is obvious 
that self-direction, — the power to choose, to resist, to act 
in^reference to law, and not from the impulse of desire, — 
is the condition of health and enduring strength. Let 
us now consider how these objects,- — which may be 
included under the general terms of nature and other 
minds, — influence for evil or good the individual soul, 
according as their impulse is blindly followed, wilfully 
perverted, or genially assimilated. 

The objects which have the most power over the mind 
are probably those in visible nature which refer to appe- 
tite and passion. These are continually striving to draw 
the mind into themselves, to weaken the force at its cen- 
tre and soul, to reduce it into mere perception and sen- 
sation, and to destroy its individual life. The emotion 
which accompanies this yielding of the mind to death 
has, with a bitterness of irony never excelled by man or 
demon, been called pleasure. Now, it is a mistake which 
is apt to vitiate theology, to confound will with wilful- 
ness, and to make destruction of will the condition of 
rising to God. But will weakened, or will destroyed, 
ever goes downwards. It delivers itself to sensuality, — or 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 197 

to fanaticism, which is the sensuality of die religious 
sentiment, — not to spirituality, not to Deity. A being 
placed like man among strong and captivating visible 
objects, becomes, the moment he loses self-direction, a 
slave, in the most terribly comprehensive meaning of 
that all-annihilating word ; and I believe the doctrine 
runs not that we are slaves, but children of God. 

Will is also often confounded with wilfulness in the 
metaphysics of that aesthetic criticism which deals with 
the grandest creations of genius. The highest mood of 
the mind is declared to be that where it loses its individ- 
uality in the objects it contemplates ; where it becomes 
objective and healthy, in distinction from subjective or 
morbid. This objectiveness is confounded with self- 
abandonment, and thus causative force is absurdly denied 
while treating of the soul's creative acts. But it is not 
by self-abandonment that the far-darting, all-assimilating 
intellect of Genius identifies itself for the moment with 
its conceptions ; it is rather by the sublimest exercise 
of will and central force. Let us take, in illustration, 
three poets, in an ascending scale of intellectual prece- 
dence ; — Keats, the representative of sensitiveness ; By- 
ron, of wilfulness ; Shakspeare, of self-direction. Now, 
in Keats, — a mind of immense spontaneous fruitfulness, 
— a certain class of objects take his intellect captive, 
melt and merge his individual being in themselves, are 



198 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

stronger than he, and hold him in a state of soft diffu- 
sion in their own nature. The impression left on the 
imagination is of sensuous beauty, but spiritual weak- 
ness. Then Byron, arrogant, domineering, egotistic, 
diseased, — viewing nature and man altogether in relation 
to himself, and spurning the objective laws of things, — 
forces objects, with autocratic insolence, into the shape 
of his own morbid nature, stamps them with his mark, 
and leaves the impression of intense, narrow, wilful 
energy. But Shakspeare, the strongest of creative intel- 
lects, and comprehensive because he was strong, passes, 
by the gigantic force of his will, into the heart of other 
natures ; is sensuous, impassioned, witty, beautiful, sub- 
lime, and terrible, at pleasure ; rises by the same force 
with which he stoops ; in his most prodigious exertions 
of energy ever observes laws instead of obeying caprice ; 
comprehends all his creations without being compre- 
hended by them ; and comes out at the end, not Fal- 
staff, or Faulconbridge, or Hamlet, or Timon, or Lear, 
or Perdita, but Shakspeare, the beneficent and august 
intellect which includes them all. The difference be- 
tween him and other poets is, that, in virtue of passing 
into another life by force of will, not by being drawn in 
by force of the object, he could escape from it with ease, 
and proceed to animate other existences, thus keeping 
his mind constantly assimilating and working with 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. ]99 

nature. Keats was drawn into his particular class of 
objects, and could not get out. Byron drew objects into 
himself, and then poisoned them by capriciously distort- 
ing and discoloring their essential character. Keats 
would have stayed with Perdita ; Byron, with Timon. 

Let us next consider, in further illustration of our 
theme, those potent forces which come, through history, 
through literature, and through social communion, from 
other minds, and from whose action a continual stream 
of influences is pouring in upon the individual soul. 
Those which proceed from society, to benefit or corrupt, 
are so obvious that it is needless to emphasize their 
power. Look around any community, and you find it 
dotted over with men, marked and ticketed as not belong- 
ing to themselves, but to some other man, from whom 
they take their literature, their politics, their religion. 
They are willing captives of a stronger nature ; feed on 
his life as though it were miraculous manna rained from 
heaven ; complacently parade his name as an adjective 
to point out their own ; and give wonderful pertinence 
to that nursery rhyme, whose esoteric depth irradiates 
even its exoteric expression : — 

" Whose dog are you ? 

I am Billy Patton's dog, 

Whose dog are you ? M 

This social servility, as seen in its annual harvest of 



200 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

dwindled souls, abject in everything, from the tie of a 
neckcloth to the points of a creed, is a sufficiently strong 
indication of the tyranny which a few forcible persons 
can establish in any of our " free and enlightened " com- 
munities ; but perhaps a more subtle influence than that 
which proceeds from social relations, comes from that 
abstract and epitome of the whole mind of the whole 
world, which we find in history and literature. Here the 
thought and action of the race are brought home to the 
individual intelligence ; and the danger is, that we make 
what should be our emancipation an instrument of servi- 
tude, fall a victim to one author or one age, and lose the 
power of learning from many minds, by sinking into the 
contented vassal of one ; and end, at last, in an intellectual 
resemblance to that gentleman who only knew two tunes, 
"one of which, 5 ' he said, "was Old Hundred, and the 
other — was n't." The danger to individuality, in reading, 
is not that we repeat an author's opinions or expressions, 
but that we be magnetized by his spirit to the extent of 
being drawn into his stronger life, and losing our partic- 
ular being. Now, no man is benefited by being con- 
quered; and the most modest might say to the mightiest, 
— to Homer, to Dante, to Milton, to Goethe, — "Keep 
off, gentlemen, — not so near, if you please ; you can do 
me vast service, provided you do not swallow me up ; my 
personal being is small, but allow me to say of it, as 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 201 

Touchstone said of Audrey, his wife, * A poor thing, sir, 
but mine own.' " 

Indeed, we can never fully realize and reverence a 
great nature, never grow through a reception of his spirit, 
unless we keep our individuality distinct from his. In 
the case of a large and diseased mind, the caution be- 
comes more important. The most popular poet of the 
present century is so in consequence of the weakness of 
his readers, who are not so much his pupils as his slaves. 
Byron, in virtue of his superior force, breaks into their 
natures, so to speak, — passes into the very core of their 
moral and intellectual being, — makes them live, in 
thought, his life, — Byronizes them : and the result of 
the conquest is a horde of minor Byrons, with their thin 
dilutions of misanthropy and licentiousness, not half so 
good as the original Peter and John they have delivered 
up. " It was nae great head in itsell," said the old 
Scotchwoman, as that of Duke Hamilton rolled from the 
block, "but it was a sair loss to him." — In view of the 
enfeebling and corrupting influence exercised by a mor- 
bid nature, one is reminded of the anecdote told of White- 
field, the preacher. A drunkard once reeled up to him, 
with the remark, — "Mr. Whitefield, I am one of your 
converts." — " I think it very likely," was the reply, " for 
I am sure you are none of God's." 

The truth probably is, that the fallacies on this subject 



202 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

of will and personality, in matters pertaining both to 
intellect and morals, have their source in man's hatred to 
work, to the independent exercise of power ; accordingly 
he tries, cunningly enough, to ignore the fact that work 
is the law by which the mind grows, and affects reverie, 
the opium-eating of the intellect, and calls it thinking. 
Theology and philosophy are both apt to be pervaded by 
a kind of pantheism, in which the perfection of our nature 
is represented to consist in merging the soul in universal 
being, and its heaven a state where it loses itself in a sea 
of delicious sensations. It is needless to add that many 
realize a tolerable heaven of their kind — on earth. 

Passing from the individual to the community, let us 
now survey the two forms of mental disease, self-worship 
and self-abandonment, as expressed in the history of 
states. A nation is no more a mere collection of indi- 
viduals, than an individual is a mere collection of facul- 
ties. It has a national life, more or less peculiar in its 
features, and subject to disease and decay ; and of this 
national life its form of civilization is the embodiment. 
Now, in the earlier ages of the world, in the childhood of 
humanity, the characteristic form of mental disease is 
feebleness of personal being, and the consequent absorp- 
tion of the individual in surrounding objects. He deifies 
and worships every form and expression of external 
power, perceiving a god, audible or visible, in every out- 






INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 203 

ward force. He is, of course, the natural prey of craft, 
ferocity, and tyranny, and his weakness is perverted into 
a besotted superstition, and a worship even of beasts and 
inanimate idols. Such were the myriads of that dark 
Egypt, which looms so gloomily up above the clouds of 
oblivion, the very image of disease and death. The 
civilization of India had the same inherent weakness ; — 
the popular mythology, a medley of picturesque brutali- 
ties ; the learned philosophy, a dreamy pantheism, wast- 
ing and withering the primitive springs of action, its first 
principle the immersion of the individual soul in the Infi- 
nite. India fell by a law as certain as gravitation before 
the ferocity of Mahometan conquest, and the Mahometan 
conquerors as certainly before the energy of England. 

The civilization of the Asiatics, indeed, was a sys- 
tematized anarchy of wretchedness and rapine, — a 
monstrous agglomeration, representing a despot, a priest- 
hood, and a huddled mass of human creatures with slave 
written upon and burnt into their inmost being. The 
vices of the tyrant are caprice, self-exaggeration, defiance 
of restraint; the vices of the slave -are falsehood, pol- 
troonery, and sensuality : and a national life composed of 
such elements, demoniacal vices on the one hand, and 
abject vices on the other, must sink into imbecility, and 
totter to the tomb. 

In passing from the simple forms of Asiatic life to the 



204 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

complex civilization of Greece, a more difficult problem 
presents itself. The Greek Mind, with its combination 
of energy and objectiveness, its open sense to all the 
influences of nature, its wonderful adaptation to philoso- 
phy, and art, and arms, — where, it may be asked, can 
you detect disease in that ? The answer to this ques- 
tion is fortunately partly contained in the statement of a 
fact. Greek civilization is dead ; the Greek mind died 
out more than two thousand years ago ; a race of heroes 
declined into a race of sycophants, sophists, and slaves; 
and no galvanic action of modern sympathy has ever yet 
convulsed it into even a resemblance of its old life. Now, 
if it died, it must have died of disease ; for nothing else 
has power to kill a nation. In considering the causes of 
the decay of a national mind so orderly, comprehensive 
and creative as the Greek, we must keep steadily 
prominent the fact that it began in Satanic energy, 
and that it is an universal law that this energy in the 
end consumes itself. Perhaps 1 the history of the Greek 
Mind is best read in the characteristics of its three 
great dramatists, — sublime and wilful in JEschylus, 
beautiful in Sophocles, sentimental in Euripides. The 
Greek deified Man, first as an object of religion, then as 
an object of art. Now, as it is a consequence of high 
culture, that a superstition, having its source in human 
passions, shall subside from a religion into an art, the 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 205 

Greek became atheistical as he grew intelligent. He 
had, so to speak, a taste for divinities, but no belief in 
them. He acknowledged nothing higher than his own 
mind; waxed measurelessly proud and conceited; wor- 
shipped, in fact, himself. He had opinions on morals, 
but he assimilated no moral ideas. Now, the moment he 
became an atheist, the moment he ceased to rise above 
himself, he began to decay. The strength at the heart 
of a nation, which keeps it alive, must either grow or 
dwindle ; and, after a certain stage in its progress, it can 
only grow by assimilating moral and religious truth. 
Moral corruption, which is the result of wilful energy, 
eats into the very substance and core of intellectual life. 
Energy, it is true, is requisite to all greatness of soul ; but 
the energy of health, while it has the strength and fear- 
lessness of Prometheus chained to the rock, or Satan 
buffeting the billows of fire, is also meek, aspiring and 
reverential. Its spirit is that of the stout old martyr, who 
told the trembling brethren of the faith who clustered 
around his funeral pyre, that if his soul was serene in its 
last struggle with death, he would lift up his hands to 
them as a sign. They watched, with tremulous eager- 
ness, the fierce element, as it swept along and over his 
withered frame, and, in the awful agonies of that moment 
when he was encircled with fire, and wholly hidden from 



206 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

their view, two thin hands quivered up above fagot and 
flame, and closed in the form of prayer. 

In the Greek mind, the wilful element took the form 
of conceit rather than pride, and it is therefore in the 
civilization of Rome that we must seek for the best 
expression of the power and tne weakness of Satanic 
passion. The myth, which declares its founders to have 
been suckled by a wolf, aptly symbolizes that base of 
ferocity and iron will on which its colossal dominion was 
raised. The Roman mind, if we look at it in relation to 
its all-conquering courage and intelligence, had many 
sublime qualities ; but pride, hard, fierce, remorseless, 
invulnerable pride and contempt of right, was its ruling 
characteristic. It existed just as long as it had power to 
crush opposition. But avarice, licentiousness, effemi- 
nacy, the whole brood of the abject vices, are sure at 
last to fasten on the conqueror, humbling his proud will, 
and turning his strength into weakness. The heart of 
that vast empire was ulcerated long before it fell. The 
sensuality of a Mark Antony is a more frightful thing 
than the sensuality of a savage ; and when self-abandon- 
ment thus succeeds to self-worship, and men are literally 
given over to their lusts, a state of society exists which, 
in its demoniacal contempt of restraint, sets all descrip- 
tion at defiance. The irruption of barbarian energy into 
that worn-out empire, — the fierce horde of savages 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 207 

that swept in a devouring name over its plains and 
cities, — we view with something of the grim satisfaction 
with which an old Hebrew might have surveyed the 
engulfing of Pharaoh and his host in the waters of the 
Eed Sea. 

In the dark ages which succeeded the overthrow of the 
Eoman empire, modern civilization had its birth; and 
with those ages it is still connected by an organic bond. 
This civilization is the most complex that ever existed. 
If we pass back to its youth, we find in it two grand 
leading principles of order and disorder, of health and 
disease, whose contact, collision and union, almost con- 
stitute its history. These are, the Feudal System and 
the Christian Church. Now, feudalism is the embodi- 
ment of Satanic pride. Its will is its law. It does 
everything it has power to do, without regard to the 
judgment of heaven or earth. It plants its iron heel firm 
upon the weak, and lifts its iron front firm upon the 
strong, and says, in its pitiless valor, — " What I obtained 
by force take by force, if you can." I speak not of the 
feudalism of romance, but of history ; not as we find it in 
Miss Porter's novels, but as we find it in the pages of 
Froissart and Monstrelet, of Michelet and Thierry. 
Feudalism, as a fact, was a cruel and remorseless oligar- 
chy, in which a horde of independent barons, acknowl- 
edging allegiance to a central power in the state, but 



208 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

nullifying the decisions of that power at their own pleas- 
ure, wielded a merciless dominion over a nation of serfs. 
Now, this relation of master and slave, this division of 
tyranny into many parts, and making each man a tyrant 
in his own domain, is the devil's own contrivance for 
ruining both the oppressor and the oppressed. It cor- 
rupts, corrodes, and consumes the inmost principle of 
national life. Accordingly, the chronicles of the middle 
ages teem with crimes, which almost realize a good- 
natured man's idea of the bottomless pit. Hatred, rapine, 
revenge, lust, blasphemy, — all those ferocious and suici- 
dal vices which slowly consume the vigor whence they 
spring, — rage and revel there, with that peculiar demo- 
niacal scorn of restraint, which characterizes the brutali- 
ties of a spiritual being. The popular insurrections of the 
period reveal, as by a flash of lightning, the condition of 
that vaunted society where capital owns labor. For a 
moment you see the serf burst his bonds, pass from the 
brute into the maniac, and rush into the insanest excesses 
of licentiousness ; and then comes the mailed baron, cool, 
collected, ruthless in his ferocity, trampling him down 
again with the diabolical malignity of inhuman strength. 
But hatred indulged to inferiors eventually generates 
hatred to equals, and poisons at last the domestic rela- 
tion itself. The unnatural crimes which blacken the 
annals of so many families, ironically styled noble, — 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 209 

father arrayed against son, brother against brother, and 
murder staining the very hearth-stones of the baronial 
castle, — are but the final results of pampered self-will, 
conducting us into the black depths of minds, in whom 
hatred and moody pride have extinguished the last 
instinct to which reverence can cling. 

Still, you may contend, in these old barons there 
dwelt a tremendous force. True : but was it durable ? 
Who are their descendants ? Mere weaklings in com- 
parison with the descendants of their former serfs. 
Where is their system ? Why, its fossil remains blew 
up not eighteen months ago, and a wondering people, 
who had long been scared by its frowning looks, found it 
to be a mere miserable shell and sham, its life and sub- 
stance all eaten away, — " self-fed and self-consumed." 

But side by side with this Feudalism was established 
the Christian Church. Thus Pandemonium and Heaven 
were both, so to speak, organized on earth ; acted and 
reacted on each other, and passed into each other's life. 
The consequence of this mixture of principles was, that 
the church was corrupted, and feudalism improved, even- 
tually to be destroyed. There was at least the recognition 
of something higher than man, something which the 
soul might reverence. This was the salvation of modern 
society, as it continually poured into veins, shrunken and 
withered by moral evil, some rills of moral life. The 
14 



210 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

leading characteristic, however, of religion, at the period 
of which we are speaking, consisted in its being an 
opinion or a fanaticism. The feudal baron would have 
been shocked had you called him an atheist, even while 
performing acts and pampering passions which are the 
essence of atheism, for he held to Christianity as an 
opinion ; and when some overpowering calamity broke 
down his stubborn will, and Remorse fixed its fangs upon 
his heart, he was as liable as the most slavish of his serfs 
to be swept away in a torrent of fanaticism. But this 
fanaticism, though itself a disease, and representing a 
will in ruins rather than a character built up, is still a 
reaction against pride, and limits the ravages of moral 
evil, as physical suffering limits unbridled appetites. 

Now, if we examine modern history with a view to 
observe the working of the religious element in its events, 
— watching this element as it mingles with the harsher 
qualities of that mass of humanity of whose life it forms 
a part, — we cannot fail to notice its agency in every 
great social convulsion which has saved modern civiliza- 
tion from the death of the ancient, and saved it by 
toppling down the institutions in which its social disease 
had come to a head. But we shall also see that each 
reform and revolution has partaken of the corruption of 
the community in which it originated ; has been but an 
inadequate expression of moral force ; and has exhibited 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 211 

unmistakable signs of the Satanic element blended with 
its beneficent purpose. In short, modern civilization, in 
regard to its life, is a corrupted Christianity. It has 
opinions more or less true, but it has imperfectly assimi- 
lated truth. It assents to perfect doctrines, but it lives a 
kind of Christian diabolism. Consequently, all the great 
movements of the European mind have been but fits 
of splendid fanaticism, followed by reactions towards 
apathy ; and have indicated little more than the desperate 
moral disease they partially eradicated. The Crusades, 
the Reformation, the English Revolutions of 1640 and 
1688, the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848, all 
prove that a community cannot lift itself by a convulsive 
throe above the high water mark of its practical life. Its 
contortions are signs of vitality, but of vitality struggling 
with deatli. There has been progress in European 
society, if we reckon it not by years but centuries ; but it 
has been a progress marked by jerks rather than by steps. 
It has not yet arrived at that degree of spiritual force, 
that momentum of moral energy, which is the condition 
of healthy motion, — of steady, temperate, determined, 
onward, ever onward movement. At the present time it 
presents no spectacle of order, but rather of disorder after 
stagnation. Peace it does not deserve, and peace it will 
not obtain. Repose is harmonious activity, the top and 
crown of the highest force, leaning for support on eternal 



212 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

laws ; not that sultry and sluggish apathy which lazily 
welters in fleeting expedients. The legitimist, who 
would establish apathy under the forms of monarchy; the 
agrarian, who would establish apathy under the forms of 
communism ; are both mistaking immobility for order, 
and seeking material happiness through intellectual 
death. Comfort is the god of this world, but comfort it 
will never obtain by making it an object. 

In considering the national life of our own country, I 
would wish to treat it neither in the style of a Jeremiad, 
nor in the style of a Fourth of July oration. Our national 
life is peculiar, not only as a composite formed from an 
imperfect fusion of different races, but it is open to influ- 
ences from all ages and all times. Though a civiliza- 
tion may die, it leaves imperishable records of itself in 
history and in literature, and these, after the nation 
itself is dead, become living and active agents m mould- 
ing the natures of all with whom they come in contact. 
Accordingly, as everybody here reads or listens, India, 
Greece, and Rome, as well as Germany, France, and 
England, rush into our national life through a thousand 
conductors, — their diseased as well as healthy elements 
becoming objects which we assimilate, and which palpa- 
bly affect our conduct. The conceit of Greece, the pride 
of Rome, the arrogance of feudal Europe, speak and act 
in America to-day, from the lips and in the lives of dem- 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 213 

ocrat and moneycrat, of philanthropist and misanthrope. 
The national life, in short, is to a certain extent diseased, 
and our people more or less believe in the capital error 
that they can thrive by selfishness, injustice, and energy 
unregulated by law. 

This wilful element is so modified by institutions, that 
in the northerner it appears as conceit, in the southerner 
as pride. Both doubtless possess great virtues, but as 
ooth are sufficiently well acquainted with that fact, let 
us here dwell ungraciously on the vices of each. The 
leading defect of the Yankee consists in the gulf which 
separates his moral opinions from his moral principles. 
His talk about virtue in the abstract would pass as sound 
in a nation of saints, but he still contrives that his inter- 
ests shall not suffer by the rigidity of his maxims. He 
goes, so to speak, for the linen decencies of sin ; and the 
Evil One, being an accommodating personage, will as 
readily appear in satin slippers as in cloven hoofs. Your 
true Yankee, indeed, has a spruce, clean, Pecksniffian 
way of doing a wrong, which is inimitable. He passes 
resolutions declaring himself the most moral and relig- 
ious man in the land, and then, with the solemn strut of 
an Alsatian hero, proceeds to the practical business of 
life. Believing, after a certain fashion, in justice and 
retribution, he still thinks that a sly, shrewd, keen, sup- 
ple gentleman like himself, can dodge, in a quiet way, 



214 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

the moral laws of the universe, without any particular 
pother being made about it. He is a self-admiration 
society in one. He will never be first in a scheme of 
rapine ; but, once drawn in, to him, as to Macbeth, re- 
turning is as tedious as go on. If you ask his opinion 
about a recent war, he will put on a moral face, declare 
bloodshed to be an exceedingly naughty business, and 
roll off a series of resounding schoolboy commonplaces, 
as though he expected a choir of descending angels had 
paused in mid air to hear and be edified ; but then, he 
adds, with a compromising chuckle, that it was an amaz- 
ingly bright thing though, that whipping of the Mexi- 
cans ! Here it is, — he really believes in whipping the 
weak. He loves energy in itself, apart from the pur- 
poses which make energy beneficent; and as he is apt to 
deem his intelligence appropriately employed in preying 
on those who have less, his practical philosophy has some- 
times found vent in that profound and elegant maxim, — 
" Every one for himself, and Satan catch the hindmost." 
True, Satan does catch the hindmost, but all history 
teaches that in the end he catches the foremost also. 

But, I think I hear you ask, what say you of our phi- 
lanthropy ? Certainly nothing here as to its beneficent 
action, but a word as to its diseased aspect. It is to be 
feared that our benevolence is more opinion than life, 
and, accordingly, it is apt to degenerate into sentiment- 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 215 

ality or malice ; to be mere inoffensively ineffective 
primer morality and elegant recreation of conscience, or 
morose, snappish and snarling invective ; in other words, 
to lack will, or to be wilful. In a community whose life 
is in any way diseased, it is difficult for the best men to 
escape the ruling contagion ; to oppose an evil without 
catching it ; to war with the devil without using the 
devil's own weapons. 

But perhaps the chief Satanic element in our national 
life comes from the south. There, in the "full tide" of 
unsuccessful " experiment," is a feudal system, modified 
by modern humanity, but modified also by modern thrift. 
The feudal baron did not sell his serfs. Now, this pecu- 
liar institution has one vital evil which alone would ruin 
any country outside of Adam's paradise, — it makes 
labor disreputable. But it is bad in every respect, cor- 
rupting the life both of master and slave ; and it will in- 
evitably end, if allowed to work out its own damnation, in 
a storm of fire and blood, or in mental and moral sterility 
and death. Looking at it, not sentimentally or shrewishly, 
much less with any mean feeling of local exultation, but 
simply with the eye of reason, — what is it but a rude and 
shallow system of government, which has been tried over 
and over again, and exploded over and over again, the 
mere cast-off nonsense of extinct civilizations, bearing on 
its front the sign of being a more stupid blunder than it 



216 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

is a crime ? Now, we can sympathize with a person who 
has had the gout transmitted to him, the only legacy of 
a loving father; but that a man should go deliberately to 
work, bottle in hand, to establish the gout in his own 
system, is an absurdity which touches the Quixotic in 
diabolism. Yet this, or something like to this, has been 
gravely proposed, and some of our southern brethren 
have requested us to aid in the ludicrously iniquitous 
work. No; we should say to these gentlemen, — If you 
have a taste for the ingenuities of mischief, plant, if you 
will, on your new territory, small-pox and typhus fever, 
plant plague, cholera and pestilence, but refrain, if not 
from common honesty, at least from common intelligence, 
from planting a moral disease infinitely more destructive, 
and which will make the world shake with laughter or 
execrations, according as men consider the madness of 
its folly, or the brazen impudence of its guilt. 

In these remarks on Intellectual Disease, I have refer- 
red all along, negatively at least, to Intellectual Health. 
We have seen that this health consists neither in the 
self-abandonment of the sensitively weak, nor the self- 
worship of the wilfully strong. A few words more, to 
guard against some possible misconceptions. Self-direc- 
tion of mental power, which has been assumed as the 
condition of healthy mind, is the only possible means of 
self-devotion, of self-sacrifice, of rising above self. It 



INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 217 

indicates a mind serene, cheerful, hopeful, courageous, 
ever active, ever aspiring, with reverence for all above 
itself, and genial love, not bitter contempt, for all below. 
But I might well be accused of shallow philosophy, did I 
leave the subject here. Mind, it is true, is free spiritual 
force, but it is inscrutably dependent on the Force which 
created it. It is a cause, but a limited cause ; a power, 
constituted such by an Infinite Power; and it grows 
mightier as it ascends to its Source. In this connection, 
let me not presume to speak, but call witnesses from the 
mountain peaks and pinnacles of intellect, — beings who 
rose thither in virtue of an amazing force directed up- 
wards, — that they may testify to their deep sense of 
this mysterious dependence. Thus Newton closes the 
greatest work of pure science which ever came from the 
mind of man, with an affecting thanksgiving to that Infi- 
nite Intelligence who bestowed the power which produced 
it. Thus Spenser, with his exhaustless opulence of fan- 
ciful creation, and burning sense of the loveliness of 
things, can still find in the world of nature and the world 
of imagination no fit symbols of the Vision which haunts 
his soul, until it is lifted up in a " Hymn to Heavenly 
Beauty." Thus Milton, in whom glowed a spirit that 
braved every storm of fortune and spurned every touch 
of fear, from whose brow glanced harmless the thunders 
of dominant hierarchies, and who opposed to unnatural 



218 INTELLECTUAL HEALTH AND DISEASE. 

persecution adamantine will, still never " soared in the 
high reason of his fancies, with his garland and singing 
robes about him," without first, in his own divine words, 
" pouring out his soul in devout prayer to that Eternal 
Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, 
and sends out His Seraphim, with the hallowed fire of 
His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom He 
pleases." And from one of England's most curious and 
not least sceptical of intellects, a deep and prying 
inquirer into the mysteries of his consciousness, comes 
that burst of mournful rapture, which has awed and 
thrilled every soul in which it has entered, that " there 
is a common spirit which plays within us yet makes no 
part of us, the Spirit of God, the fire and scintillation of 
that noble and mighty essence which is the life and 
radical heat of all minds ; and," he adds, " whosoever 
feels not the warm breath and gentle ventilation of this 
spirit, (though I feel his pulse,) I cannot say he lives ; 
for, truly, without this, to me there is no heat under the 
tropic, and no light, though I dwelt in the very body of 
the sun." 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



021 716 299 31 



10/3/12 



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